The pharmaceutical industry has long argued that high drug prices are a good thing because the profits from these price hikes allow companies to spend more on research and development to discover and launch the cures of the future.
To test the claim that higher drug prices drive innovation, we gathered data from the industry, individual companies, and the FDA to conduct a counterfactual analysis: what would happen at some of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world if prices on certain blockbuster drugs had remained constant over the last 10 years?