STAT+: Pharma’s trade group spent heavily on search ads to sway public opinion — SkimNews
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- PhRMA spent an estimated $59 million on search advertising over a seven-year period to influence how Americans view prescription drug costs, according to a new analysis that modeled the spending.
- PhRMA put roughly $32 million of that budget behind ads linked to insurance and health plan searches, the largest single category of the campaign.
- PhRMA directed another $28 million to its own web pages and domains attacking pharmacy benefit managers, which drugmakers argue are the true culprits behind rising prices for many medicines.
- Medicare's 2023 launch of drug price negotiations coincided with a surge in PhRMA's search-ad spending, alongside other well-publicized legislative and regulatory actions.
- Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics published the analysis: PhRMA used more than 283,500 distinct keywords to generate 17.1 million paid visits from 2019 through 2025.
Why it matters: For consumers searching for insurance or health plans, the industry's own framing arrived with the bill attached: $28 million of PhRMA's $59 million pushed the argument that pharmacy benefit managers, not drugmakers, drive up prices. The surge around Medicare's 2023 price talks shows the buy was tied to moments of policy pressure.
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