As someone who works in advertising, was a staffer on the Hill, and the brother of someone who had cancer, I can tell you these prices are not justified. Pharmaceutical corporations, and they are that, corporations, should not be able to afford as much advertising as they currently pay to develop, produce, and air. They pay ad agencies an obscene amount of money to develop bullshit concepts like people walking on a beach in slow motion, and pay production companies and hack directors another obscene amount of money to produce them (anyone with a camera, 2 attractive people a basic understanding of lighting can do on, but the ones you see have 6-figure budgets). Anyone who tells you these medicine prices are justified are either politicians who have been bribed into voting on bills they didn't read or write, or are directly profiting from them. This is one of the most unethical aspects of American government and society today. If you don't know why, it's because the corporations pay lobbyists (lawyers) millions of dollars to write bills (laws) that benifit them, then have more lobbyists on the Hill every day congress is in session (not many) making deals to get their votes. They then donate to politicians' campaigns or PAC's (bribe) to get the votes on these bills they've written which congress doesn't even read. This works because the American public can't be bothered to even call or write their representative, much less visit their local office or DC office, and they definitely don't donate money for campaigns. If it were backwards, if the public were crazy interested, actively reaching out, threatening not to vote for them (which requires paying attention during primaries and not only voting on party lines in general elections), we'd have a single payer system, the best educational system in the world, the best infrastructure in the world, the lowest unemployment in the world, the lowest incarceration rates in the world, no student loan debt... So, democracy does work. The people have just given the keys to multi-national corporations so they can focus on Facebook and selfies.