by Wolf Richter
Wolf Street
How to wreck the maxed-out American consumer.
Total US spending on prescription drugs in 2015, at the manufacturers’ level and as measured by “invoice pricing,” jumped by 12.2% to $424.8 billion, after having already soared 14.2% in 2014! A two-year increase of 28%!
So you’d think we’d get some results for all this moolah. But no.
Life expectancy in the US, at 78.7 years at birth, ranks between 34th and 52nd place globally, depending on who does the counting, wedged somewhere between Bahrain and Cuba, and about 5 years below the top.