posted September 15, 2009 08:49 AM         

the Obama Administration has struck a deal with Big Pharma: To win its support for health care reform, the Administration has promised that any reform legislation will ban the government from negotiating lower drug prices. So Big Pharma can charge whatever it wants for patented drugs. In return, the pharmaceuticals soon will begin a $150 million advertising campaign on behalf of reform.

All I can say is, those had better be damn good ads.

This eliminates an area in which real cost savings could have been made. The savings in the area of pharmaceuticals has been capped at $80 billion over the next ten years. Many believe the government could have used its purchasing power to bring drug prices down.

And all of that research that costs money [and not generic research!] The fact is that in recent years the pharmaceutical industry hasn’t been putting that much effort into research for shiny new drugs. The bigger effort has been research into “me too” drugs — drugs that are close copies of other drugs that are making big profits. It is far more profitable for the drug companies to make a little research effort into tweaking an existing popular drug (and getting a new patent thereby) than to do a lot more research that is genuinely innovative but which may or may not pan out.

Oh, about those direct-to-consumer prescription drug ads? The pharmaceutical industry spend $11 million a day on those ads. That $11 million a day counts as part of the cost of health care in America.

it is corporate sponsored propaganda

i also read that- for many years most of the breakthrough research has not been done at private pharmaceutical companies but at federally funded research labs, usually universities or academic medical facilities. The for-profit drug companies then take that basic research and use it to create and manufacture their products. The research done by drug companies does take time and money, but they aren’t doing the innovation by themselves.

Of course, in Conservative World it’s the pure and noble pharmaceutical industry, which labors long and selflessly on our behalf, that is being forced into a deal with the devil — the “devil” being the Obama Administration, which managed to usurp power by getting itself elected. Let’s get it straight, folks. We’re not citizens any more; we’re consumers. And our government takes its just powers from the consent of special interests, not the governed.

When the deal with pharma was being brokered- when it looked as if this deal would fall through, Henry I. Miller and Jeff Stier wrote an op ed that appeared in several publications, including the Los Angeles Times.
"..this sector has been one of the nation’s most innovative and productive. The proposals are moving us inexorably toward drug rationing, although politicians avoid that term like the plague."
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First, Miller is a fellow at the Hoover Institution, a right-wing think tank. Other Hoover fellows include as Condoleezza Rice, George Shultz, Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, and Edwin Meese. Stier is associated with the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH),
A number of pharmaceutical companies are among ACHS’s corporate sponsors, as are the Sarah Scaife Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Adolph Coors Foundation, and other of the extremist right-wing family trusts that keep the Right funded and are involved in promoting mob violence at congressional town hall meetings. This is not disclosed in the Los Angeles Times, however.

Anyway, in effect Miller and Stier claim that if the Obama Administration tries to squeeze cost savings out of the pharmaceutical industry, there won’t be any more shiny new drugs to cure whatever you’ve got. The argument is that, yes, the U.S. pharmaceutical industry makes big profits, but they need those big profits to pay for research.

Again why are we settling?

I have read many instances of cost comparisons one study compared the price of years supply of Zocor as paid by Medicare Part D ( administered by Private Insurance companies and forbidden for Government to negotiate prices with VA (government run and allowed to negotiate prices ) The Medicare cost was $1485 while the VA cost was(GET THIS) $127

I never did study economics, but if the money generated by Big Pharma was then being used to pay for the cost of the research, why would it be considered profit?

posted September 15, 2009 09:01 AM         

I bookmarked the following, and did not save the writer-

WellCare v HealthCare

1. Prevention, the key to future health, isn't being followed enough. That's why Americans are getting more obese and sedentary every year. That's why sugary drinks are now the single largest source of calories in the average diet. Alcohol and tobacco still account for 35% of all medical expenditures. Leading causes of bad health — obesity, heart disease, and Type 2 diabetes — could be rolled back by sensible prevention guidelines that people simply aren't following.

2. Supply and demand for doctor care is upside down. Patients aren't demanding the bulk of the $700 billion in unnecessary tests and procedures performed every year in this country. Doctors are creating the demand to cover their backs and increase their income. Even conscientious doctors who put the patient first are caught in lockstep habits, calling for unnecessary tests because that's what doctors do in this country.

3. Without a public option, there's no real incentive for insurance companies to lower their costs. The free market isn't free when the consumer is presented with noncompetitive insurance plans that basically aim at corporate profit and when Wall Street dictates how corporations must be run in order to survive.

4. To borrow a phrase from Secretary Califano, we've become a "sick-care system" that puts all its
efforts in developing newer drugs and offering more surgery once a person is ill. Doctors are not trained to keep people healthy. They are also strongly tempted to perform needless procedures that do not extend life span, such as hysterectomies, lower back surgery, heart bypass, and balloon angioplasty.

5. We are addicted to the sick-care system, and no money is being allocated in any of the reform bills in Congress to breaking this addiction. Massive public education was successful, over a long period of time, in getting people to quit smoking. Now we need the same massive public education to get them to adopt prevention. Will doctors, insurance companies, and big pharma do the job for us? Well, did big tobacco do the job of ending smoking? Without government action, the private sector will push drugs and surgery because prevention doesn't show up as profit on their bottom line.

posted September 15, 2009 09:10 AM         

As books like Marcia Angell’s The Truth About the Drug Companies and Merrill Goozner’s The $800 Million Pill point out, a lot of the alleged innovation we get from private industry just isn’t all that innovative. Rather than concentrating on developing true blockbusters, for the last decade or so the pharmaceutical industry has poured the lion’s share of its efforts into a parade of “me-too” drugs–close replicas of existing treatments that offer little in the way of new therapeutic advantages but generate enormous profits because they are patented and because companies have become exceedingly good at promoting their sales directly to consumers.

posted September 15, 2009 04:31 PM         

ironically i have to agree that priorities are set which slow down some people's "service" in nationalized health...which is how i discovered i didn't need to go to the doctor so much!! which saved the national health and myself a TON of time and money, and improved my health immeasurably.

we tend to believe the ads to the point that we actually think, if we just pay enough money into the pot we will never be sick, never get old, and MAYBE never die? what if all that was possible WITHOUT paying through the nose for all these new and pseudo-new drugs?