1. In the Drugs discussion forum, respond to the following: a. What are the benefits to bringing drugs to the market? What are the costs to bring a drug to the market? b. How do we balance the financial return on drugs with patient need? c. How does the immunization experience (parents choosing not to have their children immunized based on flawed data) and reduced production of drugs secondary to liability exposure pertain to this discussion?

Of course, there are financial benefits to bringing a drug to the market. Pharmaceutical companies spend billions of dollars developing new drugs, and those investments must be recouped by sales. Sometimes commercial access to a drug allows more progress to be made in research that can lead to other uses of the drug in medical treatment. Outside of the financial benefits, there is the benefit of progressively more effective and efficient treatment for patients who need the drug. According to Matthew Herper, writing in Forbes magazine, although the drug industry has been tossing around the number of $1 billion for years, the average drug developed by a major pharmaceutical company costs at least $4 billion, and it can be as much as $11 billion. Herper says that the $1 billion number works for the pharmaceutical industry because it seems to justify the idea that medicines should be pricey without making it seem that inventing new medicines is so expensive an endeavor as to be ultimately futile.
Patient need should drive the type and amount of drugs produced, but at the same time, the companies must make enough money off the drugs to remain financially successful. That’s a tough balance to achieve. The Centers for Disease Control reports that more than one-third of the adults in the U.S. have high blood pressure and high levels of bad cholesterol (Falco MIriam, 2011). That means there is a large market