Chewing on The Cost of Living

The numbers don’t jibe with the vitriol.

Pharmaceutical companies are the general public policy whipping boy of choice for rising healthcare costs, even though drugs represent only 10% of the country’s national health care bill.

Yet, according to a Dartmouth Medical School's Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, 76% of Americans blame the drug makers for the high costs. Oh, by the way, that is after those drug makers have spent over $1 billion to bring a single drug to market according to all the guidelines and “suggestions” made by the FDA.

And what about doctors and hospitals who account for 52 percent of all national health spending? Just 59% of respondents named hospitals, and 47% percent named doctors as major spending culprits. (Percentages add up to more than 100% because respondents could select as many factors as they wanted.)

There is a real disconnect between the perception of who is increasing costs and those who are actually doing it.

It is kind of like going to grocery store and complaining about rising food prices. After you go to the pharmacy, oay for those pills and then put them in your mouth, you are chewing on the cost of living.

It is so much harder to criticize or revile the costs of the doctor who is managing your chronic diabetes or high blood pressure or the hospital who is taking care of you after your angioplasty or appendectomy.

Those people who are working at Pfizer, BMS, Merck, GSK et.al do not get a free pass. And this point of perception is precisely where pharmaceutical marketing communications break down. When you need Valtrex or Flomax or Lipitor, those DTC ads are great motivators. But when you want to communicate the overall value proposition of prescription products or the industry, life sciences still struggle in developing the consumer/patient insights necessary to represent value. Here, a spoonful of the right sugar would help make the medical expenses go down.

The challenge is translating those needs and insights into getting consumers to understand the cost/ratio benefits of development and consequent patient relief or mitigation or survival.

Evidence-based medicine, costly procedures and interventions, quality of life. The actuarial buzzwords can chill the spine as fast as an epidural.

It is important, though, to spend much more time on the marketing related to get consumers/patients to understand the cost of chewing on living.