Welcome to Industry Focus, the podcast that dives into a different sector of the stock market every day.

I'm your health care show host Christine Harjus and it's March 1st.

I'm in Alexandria, Virginia at Fool HQ, and I have health care

contributor Todd Campbell on the line. Todd, welcome to another week of

industry focus.

Hi Christine, it's pleasure to be here. How are you today?

Doing great. I am excited for today's episode.

We want to tackle a pretty important question, which is,

why are prescription drugs so darn expensive?

And we will attempt to answer that on this show and then after

that we want to give you some specific actionable advice that we think can

improve all of our listeners investing immediately.

So it should be a good one.

Let's dive in.

So we'll start with the drug question.

Why are drugs priced the way they are?

If you have been reading the news lately,

you've seen headlines about price gouging and health care reform,

this is a hot button issue, and it affects the vast majority of our wallets directly.

And there's a lot of political attention being given to it as well.

We've had some listeners write in expressing concern about drug pricing and asking us questions.

So we figured we would try to boil it down and have a conversation about what exactly goes into a drug price.

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