It's amazing to me that you know me so little. Don't be fooled by my liberal leanings. They only go so far. Fiscally, I'm a bit more conservative. I'm not talking Utopia or fiction here. I like pharmaceutical companies and competition and making a profit. Those are good things. Where I part ways is in the lobbying where they buy off our legislators. In that 2003 Medicare bill, the Government should have had to the right to negotiate discounts. NEGOTIATE, not mandate. The drug companies deserve their damn profits, just not at the expense of those least able to afford it.

I did provide links for each of those because I only quoted things in part. The Pfizer Financial Statement was linked so you could read the whole thing formatted correctly. I wasn't willing to spend an hour getting the formatting right in damn tikiwiki. That was their actual official financial statement. And yes, they lump those things together; however, they also have some marketing lumped in with R&D. I started to tell you about it but thought perhaps it was too involved to explain. When they're running drug trials, they had meetings and are paying for educational seminars, etc. and talking building up good will for when the FDA approves their new drug. At that time, they reap what they've been sowing. So those are marketing costs but they're putting them into R&D because it's the investigator (M.D.) they're putting their funds into. That investigator is out promoting the company in that M.D.'s X, Y, Z, A, B & C know it's Pharma company Doomaflozie that is paying for this educational seminar or that dinner or those theatre tickets. It's all marketing. Their drug reps are in sales or marketing. When one is sales gets support $ for a seminar or other function, including where the drug reps follow the MD's around, that is put into the R&D budget. It all gets pretty complicated how they manipulate it. I've seen it a million times.

The Pharma companies used to pay our MD as much as $500 (didn't go to the MD directly but to a fund that he could use for professional expenses) to follow him around the Clinic for a day or two including lunch where they discussed a lot of things and the M.D. taught the drug reps a lot about the research and how treatments worked, etc., etc. I used to coordinate those and collect the monies for deposit into Foundation accounts. My boss would then be able to use that money for educational purposes for himself and his staff or to pay for professional meeting lunches, etc. My boss was a world renowned expert in Clinical Pharmacology and cholesterol-lowering drugs. He knew how to milk Big Pharma. It was a symbiotic relationship.