We read at statista.com, that “pharma revenues worldwide totaled 1.27 trillion U.S. dollars in 2020.” Additionally, an article at nih.gov, tells us that “approximately 80% of antimicrobial, cardiovascular, immunosuppressive, and anticancer drugs are of plant origin.” The bottom line is that way before the modern pharmaceutical industry came to age, medicines that were provided for the general welfare of the people, primarily were those that involved the utilization of plant species and other natural remedies so provided to us by Mother Nature for the healing of various ills.
While, no doubt, modern pharmaceuticals have done an outstanding job of providing critical and valuable medicine so needed for the health and repair of human bodies, this has come though at a very great monetary cost to that general public, for not all those pharmaceuticals are even that innovative, for they often rely instead in the taking of that which is free from Mother Nature, and then essentially manipulating such in a manner in which a patent is created for that medicine, thereby providing to that pharmaceutical entity, healthy profits, so made upon the ill health of those patients so needing that medicine.
In America, the pharmaceutical industry is primarily profit-based, thereby leading to the dichotomy of those that while providing medicine for the benefit of those so needing such, are doing so in a manner in which they extract profit from those ill patients, and deliberately are retaining and therefore privatizing such medical knowledge so as to obtain more profit, at the expense of the general public, so done deliberately and primarily for the benefit of that corporation and its shareholders.
The argument could be made and should be made as to whether or not, for-profit pharmaceutical companies are beneficial for the general public in whole, or whether they are in fact, parasitic in their structure; thereby making their money upon those patients that are placed in the unenviable position of needing medicine for their good health, and so therefore paying whatever so needs to be paid to the piper of that medicine so provided.
After all, any company of which its highest mission is to make money and profits for its shareholders is almost by definition, not going to be the appropriate company to provide safe, reliable, and fair priced pharmaceuticals to those that need such, for one mission battles against the other, of which, the winner, thereof, is the billions upon billions of profits so made by those pharmaceutical companies, extracted essentially from the pockets of those that are sickly.
In truth, the more worthy objective for those that are in the healthcare business, should be to actually provide that healthcare in a manner in which the people are most benefited by the knowhow and breakthroughs of that industry, as opposed to some players within that industry seeing those that are ill, as an opportunity to extract whatever profit that they can from them, knowing that those that are sick, don’t typically have a lot of good or viable alternatives.
Finally, the fact that so many products provided by the pharmaceutical industry are actually derivatives of what is so found in Mother Nature, should bring great shame to many of those that are the purveyors of such, for their purposeful greed and their misuse of expertise for their own personal benefit, at the expense of those in no good position to effectively fight back.