HHS Is Driving A Paradigm Change Onto The Pharmaceutical Industry

There's something for every illness. Photo of shelves stocked with various medicinal products in a pharmacy. getty

Last month the Trump Administration announced sweeping changes to the decades old rules that allow pharmaceutical manufacturers to advertise products direct-to-consumer. FDA Commissioner, Marty Makary, noted that since 1997 when the rules changed allowing drug promotion as long as ads described side effects along with clinical benefit, manufacturers have been spending billions to promote their drugs. The amount of money spent on advertising in the following decade increased 8-fold, from $700 million to $5.4 billion in 2006. That number today is around $10 billion and according to some estimates represents approximately 31% of what the U.S. pharma industry spends on brin