Not only are people paying way more for drugs these days, pharmaceutical companies are raking it in, with both sales and profit margins reaping the benefits.
Modern Healthcare reports that, according to the Government Accountability Office, people are forking over almost twice as much for prescription drugs as they did 30 years ago. Retail prescription drug expenses ate up some 12 percent of all U.S. healthcare spending in 2015, an increase from the 1990s' 7 percent.
Pharmaceutical and biotechnology sales revenue rose, too, increasing from $534 billion to $775 billion between 2006 and 2015, according to a recent GAO report. And the beneficiaries of all that largesse are the drug companies, with two thirds seeing their profit margins increase by an average of 17.1 percent over that period.
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