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25 Most Prescribed Medication in the World

Ty Haqqi
7 min read

In This Article:

In this article, we will be taking a look at the 25 most prescribed medication in the world. To skip our detailed analysis, you can go directly to see the 10 most prescribed medication in the world.

The advancements that the medical field has accomplished over the past century, and especially in recent decades, has exponentially raised our standard of living. Not only are people living longer, with the World Economic Forum stating that life expectancy at birth for both sexes has increased from 46.5 years in 1950 to 71.7 years in 2022, but the quality of living has improved dramatically too, with new innovations being implemented every year. Whether it's the Covid-19 vaccine that Pfizer Inc. (NYSE:PFE) and Moderna, Inc. (NASDAQ:MRNA), which are also among the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world, have come up with in record time to potentially save tens of millions of lives and reduce the burden on the global health structure, to companies such as Gilead Sciences, Inc. (NASDAQ:GILD) and ViiV (a majority-owned company by GlaxoSmithKline plc (NYSE:GSK)), which have dramatically improved the lives of people living with HIV and people susceptible to HIV, medication's importance cannot be understated.

In most developed countries healthcare is free. Taxes and deductions from everyone's earnings ensure a social, universal healthcare system which allows everyone to afford the treatment. Furthermore, in most European, and other countries, drug prices are regulated by governments to make sure that they remain affordable for the general masses and maintain a balance between profits for the company and affordable healthcare for residents. The one major exception is, as you've probably guessed, the United States of America.

25 most prescribed medication in the world
25 most prescribed medication in the world

Photo by Myriam Zilles on Unsplash

Even though the United States is the biggest economy in the world, and has been for around a century now, healthcare has still remained mostly in private hands. While that has allowed businesses and R&D to flourish as costs have been recouped through higher drug prices, this has had the consequence of making many types of medication unaffordable for people who desperately need it to survive. Most people are only afforded healthcare insurance through their employer, which means that if a person becomes unemployed, not only do they lose out on their income, healthcare becomes almost impossible to afford as well. Since there is no governmental oversight, prices for drugs can be increased massively, with RAND Corporation stating that prescription drug prices in the country are 2.56 times than those of 32 other countries. If the focus is only on brand prices, the discrepancy rises even further, with U.S. prices being 3.44 times higher than in other nations. According to a senior healthy policy research at RAND, Andrew Mulcahy: "Brand-name drugs are the primary driver of the higher prescription drug prices in the United States. We found consistently high U.S. brand name prices regardless of our methodological decisions.” The only relatively positive fact for the U.S. is that generic drug prices are actually just 84% of those in other countries. The same study also found out that France, Italy and the United Kingdom had the lowest drug prices among G7 nations while Canada, Germany and Japan have the highest prices.

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