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NPR’s Alix Spiegel recently reported that changes in advertising laws for pharmaceutical companies since the 1990s have had a devastating impact on the country’s health care practices. Americans averaged 7 prescriptions a year in 1992, but that increased to 12 by 2008, thanks in part to widespread advertising for various drugs. As Spiegel tells it, advertisers once lobbied doctors to recommend drugs to patients, but after convincing the FDA to change certain advertising laws the industry eventually took its advertising straight to consumers. The drug companies now spend $4 billion a year on ads, and the “Nielson Co. estimates that there’s an average of 80 drug ads every hour of every day on American television.”

The drug companies, due to increased pressure in the recent healthcare debates, agreed to a moratorium on advertising of new drugs. Although some people would like to see the advertising disappear in the future, the moratorium itself has had a brutal impact on media sources that rely on the advertising and are trying to stay afloat during tough economic times.

For more on the consequences that pharmaceutical advertising has had on health care in America, see the following videos:

Discussion Questions:

1.  Why do some people think that pharmaceutical advertising, at least those ads directed straight to consumers, is unethical?

2.  Is there another side to this debate? In other words, why is such advertising appropriate, and in some cases necessary?

3.  What is the link between pharmaceutical advertising and the current health care crisis in America?

4.  Should such ads be subject to new legislation?  If so, what do you think Congress should do about the matter?