Is health research spending a measure of CSR?

ResearchAmerica, a not-for-profit public education and advocacy alliance has released its annual report on how much we are spending on health research, and depending on how you parse the numbers, it could be a good news story or bad news story.

In 2009 total US investments in health research topped $135 billion. That's a lot of money, until you consider that its only 5.6% of the $2.47 trillion spent on health care that year, and only a 0.1% increase over the previous year. Who are the biggest investors in health research?

Federal government funded $46.8 billion (up from $38.6 billion in 2008), while corporations invested $74.3 billion (down from $74.8 billion in 2008), all other sources pitched in the additional $17.8 billion.

The leading industries:

-Pharmaceutical, $32.6 billion

-Biotech, $32.6 billion

-Medical technology, $9 billion.

In that "other" category, universities spent around $10.6 billion, philanthropic foundations threw an additional $1.4 billion into the pot.

Does this mean that corporations are being more socially responsible than the government? While private industry invests substantially more, it also profit substantially and measurably more from their investments than governments, whose "profit" from investment may be measured more in population health improvement and diseases prevented.

It remains to be seen what impact continued financial stagnation will have on these investment trends, though with no end in sight to overall spending increases in health care, it will surely remain a money-laden sector.

The ResearchAmerica report is available here.

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