Ask Your Doctor. Until Then, Here’s a Word From Our Sitcom.<br />It is outrageous and it is clearly one of the reasons that our drugs are more expensive than any country in the world.”<br />It’s true that only the United States and New Zealand allow direct advertising of prescription drugs<br />to consumers, while Brazil allows some advertising of nonprescription, over-the-counter medications.<br />“One of the things we felt was important was it needed to be natural and it needed to tell his story,<br />but it also needed to be medically accurate,” said David Moore, a senior vice president at Novo Nordisk.<br />But a season earlier we had endured what Vulture called “essentially a long commercial<br />for Disney World,” the obligatory episode where a Disney sitcom goes to Disney World.<br />Commercials “can benefit health care professionals, as well as patients,” said Holly Campbell, a spokeswoman for the Pharmaceutical Research<br />and Manufacturers of America, an industry trade group, in an email.<br />“Any serious political conversation on economic incentives<br />and prescription drug cost must begin from the market distortions created when insurers and other payers negotiate rebates,” said Charles Fournier, the foundation’s vice president.<br />This past week, UnitedHealthcare, one of the largest insurers, said it would stop keeping the rebates it got from drug companies, an issue<br />that is of particular concern to the Type 1 Diabetes Defense Foundation, an advocacy group.<br />“The conditions that are being promoted change over time in conjunction with the patent cycle,” Jon Swallen, chief research officer at Kantar, said.
