My grandma, like many other elderly folks, has a seven-day pill organizer. For those of you who have never seen one, these are little plastic pill cases with a compartment for every day of the week. At the beginning of the week, people will fill Monday through Friday with the pills they’ll need to take on each respective day.

When visiting my grandma, after one of her delicious home-cooked meals, I sat back with a belly full of meat and potatoes and observe her as she takes out her organizer. She then proceeds to pop three to five different pills to treat the variety of medical ailments she endures. As I watched her, I began to think. 

I first thought about how it’s a shame she has enough health problems that she needs to take so many pills daily. After dwelling on this for a while, I realized that these pills came from some company that must make a profit selling them, and that my sweet grandma is now one of its life-long customers. 

As she takes gulps of water to swallow down pill after pill, I start to hope with every fiber of my being that the industry providing her with these chemicals that will drastically affect her body is held up to the highest ethical standards. 

Unfortunately, research has led me to conclude that U.S. pharmaceutical companies are some of the most unethical big businesses operating in our country. 

To help you understand the magnitude of the problem with the pharmaceutical industry’s influence on the U.S. government and its exploitation of patients, we need to look back in time 13 years. In 2003, former President Bush signed the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act, which would dish out up to $534 billion of taxpayer money over 10 years to Medicare to pay for roughly 75 percent of its beneficiary’s prescription drug costs. The key point here is that the act would add billions of dollars of taxpayer money to the pharmaceutical industry’s revenue. 

The act drastically helped Americans who needed expensive drugs, which is great. Unfortunately, evidence tells us that the system set in motion by the act is highly dysfunctional and that the decision to implement it was made on unstable grounds.

In his speech introducing the Modernization Act, Bush thanked a handful of politicians for helping get the bill through Congress. As it turns out, when these politicians who are seen waving and nodding as the president acknowledges them, you find that they had some pretty strong incentives to work in favor of the pharmaceutical companies.

Dennis Hastert had a long-time friendship with the owners of a lobbyist firm employed by pharmaceutical companies. He received more than $200,000 dollars in campaign donations from the health professions and pharmaceutical/health products industries a year before the bill passed. His son also worked as a lobbyist for Amgen, a pharmaceutical manufacturer.

Bill Thomas, John Breaux and Nancy Johnson received $103,475, $76,149 and $213,317 respectively in campaign donations from the pharmaceutical industry a year before the bill passed.

Top Medicare administrator Tom Scully was accused of threatening to fire an employee who wanted to inform Congress that the taxpayer’s bill would be $100 billion more than originally proposed. Scully took a job lobbying for the pharmaceutical industry 10 days after the legislation was signed.

Billy Tauzin accepted a $2 million per year job as president of a pharmaceutical manufacturer soon after the bill passed.

On top of all this, “at least 15 congressional staffers, congressmen and federal officials left to go to work for the pharmaceutical industry” after the bill was passed, according to CBS News.

George Bush himself received about $500,000 in campaign donations from pharmaceutical companies in the 2000 election, more than four times as much as his opponent Al Gore, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Can you say “conflict of interest?”  This kind of buddy-buddy behavior between politicians and corporations should not be tolerated, especially when a multi-billion dollar legislative measure is involved.

To this day, the presence of the drug industry is overbearing in Washington. In 2015, the pharmaceutical industry spent, by far, the most money on lobbying — an estimated $235 million. It also employed an estimated 1,367 lobbyists, which is more than two lobbyists per voting member of Congress.

So what has all this lobbying gotten the Big Pharma? Well, for one, government laws ban Medicare from negotiating drug prices with pharmaceutical companies. The reasons behind this are not clear. One thing that is clear, however, is that a system in which the government uses tax money to pay whatever price the pharmaceutical companies ask for benefits two groups of people: Big Pharma and the politicians who appear to be its payroll.

The Federal Drug Administration has received criticism for giving drug companies too much wiggle room. The FDA doesn’t review drug advertisements until they are already on air, and so the public is often times misled. Some studies have found that 60 percent of drug ads were misleading and 10 percent contained flat-out false information. Yet, the FDA rarely requires pharmaceutical companies to pull their ads. Whether this kind of treatment by the FDA is the result of an influence by drug companies is unclear. 

Big money means big results, and in this case, big results have manifested in the form of politics putting the interests of Big Pharma profits over the interests of sick people.