American taxpayers lose over one billion dollars annually to Big Pharma thanks to a law that allows them to write off their marketing spend, according to an analysis The Campaign for Sustainable RX Pricing (CSRxP) published Tuesday.
CSRxP found that 10 companies in the pharmaceutical industry spent nearly $14 billion on direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising in 2023.
The IRS allows companies to deduct those marketing costs from their taxes, an allowance which CSRxP claims deprives the taxpayer between $1.5 and $1.7 billion annually just from the ten companies included in the study.
Those ten companies include: AbbVie, Amgen, Biogen, Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS), Eli Lilly, Gilead Sciences, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), Johnson & Johnson (J&J), Merck and Pfizer.
Pfizer spent the most on advertising with a whopping $3.7 billion in 2023, according to the study. The company also, according…
