Both healthcare and pharmaceuticals are astoundingly unpopular in the US, ranking at the very bottom of all industries. They are not only well below restaurants and computers, but below automotive, real estate, telecom, banking and legal. They are even below oil and gas, a truly nasty industry.
The average American apparently likes used-car sales people, bankers and lawyers more than they like drug makers. That’s pretty low.
And it’s especially low when you consider what healthcare and pharma have delivered to the public in the last century: better health and longer life.
Americans live about 30 years longer than they did at the start of the 20th century. Most of this increase (about 25 years[1] ) can be attributed to public health measures, especially clean water and vaccines. But it would be reasonable to attribute five years or so of life expectancy to healthcare and pharma. Especially as those five additional years (and much of the other twenty-five) are lived with greater freedom from pain and disability than ever before.
We have cast off the burden of disease and suffering like no people before us. And we hate our liberators. How does that make sense?
I can’t imagine that there is a simple explanation, but I’ll hazard one anyway. It’s this: humans are intensely social creatures and we are very good at keeping score and detecting cheaters. The worst kind of cheating is to profit from the misfortune of others.
That, of course, is precisely what pharmas are set up to do. You suffer, through no fault of your own, and must pay to relieve that suffering. Pay or suffer. No one wants that deal. Of course we hate them.
Rational-actor, utility-maximizing economic theories dismiss this aspect of the interaction as irrelevant. If there was no willingness to pay, no one would develop a remedy. You would suffer more and the pharmas would be poorer. Everyone is worse off.
But that doesn’t matter to highly social primates. Pharmas profit from misfortune and cannot be forgiven.
Footnotes
1 thought on “Why pharma has a bad reputation”