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Sick Money

The Truth About the Global Pharmaceutical Industry

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Sick Money

By: Billy Kenber
Narrated by: Ciaran Saward
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The pharmaceutical industry is broken. From the American hedge fund manager who hiked the price of an AIDS pill from $17.50 to $750 overnight to the children's cancer drugs left intentionally to expire in a Spanish warehouse, the signs of this dysfunction are all around. A system that was designed to drive innovation and patient care has been relentlessly distorted to drive up profits.

Medicines have become nothing more than financial assets. The focus of drug research, how drugs are priced and who has access to them is now dictated by shareholder value, not the good of the public. Drug companies fixated on ever-higher profits are being fined for bribing doctors and striking secret price-gouging deals, while patients desperate for life-saving medicines are driven to the black market in search of drugs that national health services can't afford.

Sick Money argues that the way medicines are developed and paid for is no longer working. Unless we take action we risk a dramatic decline in the pace of drug development and a future in which medicines are only available to the highest bidder. In this book investigative journalist Billy Kenber offers a diagnosis of an industry in crisis and a prescription for how we can fight back.

 Biological Sciences Medicine & Health Care Industry Pharmacology Science Health Care Medicine
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Critic reviews

"Billy Kenber is one of the most promising young journalists in the land, and he has, unsurprisingly, produced a compelling debut which surprises, entertains and inspires dismay. An essential read" (SATHNAM SANGHERA)
"Billy Kenber does a fantastic job, pulling apart the origins of the drugs industry and machinations of its shameless profiteers with surgical precision . . . it’s quite a ride. A must-read for anyone who wants to understand how the drugs industry really does its business" (JACQUES PERETTI)
"A forensic and very readable account of the reforms needed to make the pharmaceutical industry serve the public good as well as private profit . . . Kenber’s ground-breaking investigative reporting has . . . resulted in a change in the law in the UK, intervention by regulators, cuts in the price of some medicines, life-changing benefits for patients, savings of hundreds of millions of pounds for the NHS and record fines for drug firms" (ANDREW GRICE)
"[Sick Money] distinguishes itself from many other books by its investigative power and meticulous clarity"
"Powerful, gripping and rigorous, this book couldn’t have come at a better time. Never has it been so important to delve into the tangled web behind the medicines and vaccines we all rely on. With years of research and reporting under his belt, Kenber is the perfect person to take us on this fascinating journey" (MAEVE McCLENAGHAN, author of NO FIXED ABODE)
"A clever exploration of a scandal that affects everyone who uses - and pays for - the NHS. This is an enormously complex subject, but Kenber finds the interesting characters and fascinating details that bring the story to life. A great and important read" (HOLLY WATT, author of CASEY BENEDICT series)
"A painstakingly researched and beautifully written history of the dark underbelly of the pharmaceutical industry, which never forgets to tell the stories of the vulnerable people harmed when these companies lose their moral compass. I could not put it down" (NIGEL PRAITIES, executive editor of the PHARMACEUTICAL JOURNAL)
All stars
Most relevant
Kenber builds on his important investigative reports for The Times—which rightly won him the 2017 award for Outstanding Contribution to Health or Medical Journalism—with this iconoclastic take on the abuses and distorted priorities of the pharmaceutical industry. At the heart of Kenber’s cogent and well-researched argument is an acknowledgement of the perverse incentives generated by the ‘wider view of drugs as financial assets disconnected from their societal importance’ and the ways in which this has led to rampant price-hiking, negativity impacted on research and development, and, most importantly, left many patients without the drugs they need.

Indeed, what is perhaps most powerful about this book is the way in which Kenber skilfully weaves in the many interviews he conducted with individuals whose loved ones died because of a lack of access to medications: a stark reminder of the ultimate impact of the ravenous appetites of shareholders, seemingly concerned only with profits. There is, for example, the awful story of the death of Meghan Patterson—a forty-seven-year-old nurse in Dayton, Ohio—who’d been unable to afford the insulin she’d been prescribed for her Type 1 diabetes. What’s particularly disturbing about this story is how there is, as Kenber writes, ‘no intrinsic reason why insulin must be so expensive’. He notes that ‘prices have soared from $20 to $275 per vial’ in the US even though a study has estimated than $6 would still give pharmaceutical companies a ‘healthy profit’.

‘It is only by facing up to all this,’ Kenber concludes, ‘and tackling the hard policy debates and decisions which must follow, that we can avoid a future in which the medicines we need are not available, either because they are unaffordable or because commercial drug discovery has been abandoned.’

It is high time that policy makers take heed of this important message.



If you liked The Secret Barrister, then this is a must-read

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