In 2025, AbbVie cut its research and development budget by 29% — the steepest R&D cut of any major pharmaceutical company that year. In the same year, AbbVie's CEO received a 75% pay raise, bringing his total compensation to $32.5 million. Same company. Same year. Same pool of capital.

That's where Episode 9 starts. And it only gets more specific from there.

Rob Burgess follows the money through the full 2025 financial picture for the 16 largest pharmaceutical companies — the advertising budgets, the executive compensation structures, the shareholder returns, the R&D cuts, and the 22,000 jobs eliminated — and then audits the decade of leadership at PhRMA, the industry's most powerful lobbying organization, that produced these numbers. Every argument the industry makes in defense of its behavior gets examined against the data. None of them hold.

In this episode:

• AbbVie: 75% CEO pay raise, 29% R&D cut, workers laid off — all in the same year
• The 16 largest pharma companies combined cut $5.9 billion from research in 2025 while returning $97 billion to shareholders
• $9 billion in direct-to-consumer advertising in 2025 — up from $6 billion in 2020 — and how the 1997 FDA rule change made it all possible
• Why Trump's September 2025 executive order on misleading drug ads and the FDA's enforcement crackdown are the right moves — and why the rulemaking needs to be codified into law
• How equity-based CEO compensation is structurally designed to reward price increases over research investment
• A decade-long audit of PhRMA's leadership: $305 million in lobbying, drug spending up 60%, advertising tripled, the revolving door kept spinning
• The four industry arguments for high prices, examined one by one against 2025 data
• Three reforms that would change the system's incentives without telling a single company to stop innovating

The bottom line: The innovation argument is not a fact. It's a cover story. The financial filings say so. A decade of data says so. AbbVie says so with every allocation decision it made in 2025.

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On December 19th, 2025, 14 pharmaceutical companies shook President Trump's hand and promised most favored nation pricing. The president called it the greatest victory for patient affordability in the history of American health care. Twelve days later, those same companies raised prices on 872 drugs. Then they launched 23 new drugs at an average price of $353,000 a year.

In Episode 8, Rob Burgess covers two stories that belong together. First: what actually happened to Trump's MFN deals — the price hikes, the new drug launch prices, and the $177 billion in combined profit that proves the "we need high prices to innovate" argument is a lie. Then: cancer drug pricing specifically, because 51% of American cancer patients go into debt paying for treatment, and the data says the prices have nothing to do with how well the drugs work.

In this episode:

• 872 drug price hikes in the first two weeks of January — from companies that had just signed MFN deals at the White House
• 23 new drugs launched by MFN deal signatories at an average price of $353,000 a year — one launched at $389,100 in the US, $37,900 in Japan
• $177 billion in combined profit, $97 billion back to shareholders, $34 billion in stock buybacks — from companies claiming they need high prices to survive
• Why the MFN deals failed: voluntary agreements without statutory enforcement are not agreements, they're handshakes
• 51% of American cancer patients go into debt paying for treatment — and peer-reviewed research finds no meaningful correlation between cancer drug prices and how well those drugs work
• Keytruda: $29.5 billion in revenue, dosing questions experts say could cut costs significantly, and a patent fortress extending to 2042
• Pharma increased cancer drug advertising by 43% while cutting R&D by 29% — in the same year
• The EPIC Act: pharma's current lobbying push to delay Medicare price negotiation on cancer drugs by four years

The bottom line: This is not a negotiating fight. You do not negotiate your way to victory with an industry that raises prices on 872 drugs twelve days after shaking the president's hand. You legislate. Codify MFN pricing. Pass the bill.

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#DrugPricing #HealthcareReform #BigPharmaExposed #PharmaGreed #CorruptionWatch

Every time a drug's patent is about to expire — every time competition is about to show up and prices are about to fall — Big Pharma runs the same play. It looks different each time. But the architecture is always identical. In Episode 7, Rob Burgess walks through that playbook move by move, using the two biggest-selling drugs in pharmaceutical history to show exactly how it works.

First: Humira. The best-selling drug on earth. Its core patent expired in 2016. Biosimilar competition didn't arrive until 2023. The six-year delay cost American patients $75 billion. Rob walks through every move that made it happen — 250 patents, nine pay-for-delay settlements, and a product switch timed to strand the competition before it arrived. All of it documented by the company's own internal records and a three-year congressional investigation.

Then: Keytruda. Merck's cancer drug. $29.5 billion in revenue last year. Core patent expires in 2028. Nearly 300 patent applications already filed. A new subcutaneous formulation launched in 2025 with patents extending to 2042. And a CEO who told investors the whole point is to turn a patent cliff into — his words — more of a hill.

In this episode:

• The four moves of the patent abuse playbook: patent thickets, pay-for-delay, product hopping, and FDA citizen petition abuse
• How 250 patents and nine pay-for-delay settlements kept Humira competition off the market for six years after its core patent expired
• The $75 billion that delay cost American patients — documented in the company's own internal projections
• How Merck is running the same play on Keytruda right now, in real time, with a 2028 patent cliff and patents extending to 2042
• The Merck CEO quote that confirms the strategy — said directly to investors in a recorded statement
• Why $3.5 billion a year flows out of American patients' pockets through pay-for-delay alone, every single year
• Three bipartisan bills already written, already introduced, one passed the Senate unanimously — and why none of them have moved

The bottom line: This is not a side issue. It is a systematic, documented, legally sophisticated strategy to deny Americans the benefits of a free market they were promised. The Senate voted unanimously to stop it. The House needs to act.

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#BustBigPharma #Humira #Keytruda #PatentThicket #DrugPricing #BigPharma #PharmaReform #MAHA #MakeAmericaHealthyAgain #PayForDelay #ProductHopping #DrugPriceReform #PrescriptionDrugPrices #AmericansForPharmaReform