For months if not years, I have been complaining inwardly (and occasionally outwardly) about the number and frequency of ads on prime-time television for one after another high-priced medication that will help solve your high blood pressure problem or your urinary frequency problem or your eczema problem or your whatever problem. Ordinary people cannot, of course, buy any of these drugs. We OPs have to convince our doctors to prescribe those pricey meds in the hope that they'll be covered by our medical insurance.
Now, drug manufacturers have two ways of marketing their wares: they can advertise directly to doctors and hospitals (and they do), and they can advertise to the potential users of their product. (That's you and me in case you didn't pick up on that right away.) They can write off the advertising expense for the first route; that's perfectly normal, a typical business expense. But they also can write off the cost to advertise to the user community.
Why? And why would they bother? Even the write-off costs them something; they're not paying taxes at 100%. The answer is that by doing so, they have turned all of us consumers into their personal lobbying army. Our task, whether we know it or not, is to convince our doctors to prescribe these drugs and generate income to the manufacturers.
There's a second benefit, however, that is much harder to discern: By sloshing ad money liberally upon this network or that one, they now hold a whip regarding broadcast content. They can influence which content broadcasters broadcast and which they do not. In that way, drug manufacturers can control the official opinions of broadcast and cable networks.
I'm thinking that's not such a good thing.
I'm thinking that it would be pretty easy to declare such expenditures to be non-deductible since the ads they fund are not directed at doctors — there are ways to target advertising much more precisely — and are thus not really a legitimate business expense.
I'm looking forward to having seen my last commercial for drugs I don't need and can't obtain without convincing my doctor that I do need them.
Posts
I hate those commercials as much as you do.
ReplyDeleteBut I'm not sure how indirect advertising is "not really a legitimate business expense." Toy makers almost always, and fast food franchises often, advertise their wares to kids, even though it's parents who decide whether those things get purchased. If my job requires me to fly to Chicago and there's a layover in Atlanta, is the portion of the flight that doesn't get me to Chicago not a legitimate business expense?
Kids may not typically buy the toys, but it's not illegal for them to do so. A kid with a big enough allowance could legally buy a brand new Mercedes. It's only because such purchases are so rare that we don't see them advertised during Saturday morning cartoons.
ReplyDeleteIf your job required you to get to Chicago and you routed that trip with a 4-day stopover in Acapulco and another 2 days in San Francisco, are you suggesting that's all legitimate just because you finally did get to Chicago? Puh-leeeze!