Prescription Drug Prices, Hospital Costs and Doctors’ Fees.

The cost of prescription drugs is a hot topic in this election year. In this new Harris Interactive survey we have repeated questions that we asked in each of the last four years to measure how attitudes and perceptions have changed. The big picture remains very much the same, with large numbers of people thinking that the prices of prescription drugs and hospitals are “unreasonably high” and should be subject to federal price regulation.

The public continues to be skeptical of arguments that government price controls would lead to fewer valuable new drugs. One reason for this is that, overwhelmingly, the public thinks that the industry’s profit margins and/or the cost of marketing and advertising exceed the cost of their medical research.

In the four years since we first conducted this research, the biggest change by far has been a very large increase in the numbers of people who think that the prices of prescription drugs are higher here than in Canada and Western Europe, up from 41 percent to 73 percent.