Posted on 06/19/2012 5:45:07 PM PDT by reaganator
A friend mine shared that he spent $455.00 for 12 pills. And commented, "There should be laws against this robbery." I suggested he find out why the pills cost so much, he does not seem interested in doing so, would rather continue to believe there is no cause to justify the high cost. But this has caused me to want to be better informed on this topic. I'd appreciate any info and links shared, thank you.
Thank you for the info.
Now, if I just had 6600 bucks and knew a broker...
hahaha, For a Broker, your on your own.
But as for the $6600, J&J’s part of the reason you don’t have it.
http://www.johnsonandtoxin.com/wallet_on_drugs.shtml
Obamacare, Ruined Economy because of it?
J&J just got hit for $1.1 Billion by the State AG of Arkansas.
Here’s why.
Here’s the verdict
http://www.pharmalot.com/2012/04/jj-is-fined-1-billion-over-risperdal-marketing/
This is the main reason they’re going around with Holder’s DOJ, hoping to settle at the Federal Level to stave off a whole lot more State by State Losses.
I work in the industry.
One big pharma has, say 35 compounds in development at any given time, of their own. A drug is an FDA approved compound, you follow. A compound is just a chemical or antibody that is about to undergo FDA approval.
These compounds are aimed at diseases that a) have the greatest number of afflicted people in the key market, which is the United States, and only the United States, and b) has a ‘method of action’ that is patentable, and thus sellable.
Here’s the thing - in order to sell your drug, you have to undergo the four phases of the FDA approval process. To get through that process, it will cost - on average - about $900MM to $1.3BB.
This does not count the introduction of the compound as a therapy or cure in a market that is not governed by such onerous regulation. Central Europe, Mexico, some Asian countries. They will evaluate it there before ever considering putting the compound through the FDA process.
Now, if a big pharma gets one blockbuster drug approved every other year, they will just clean up. The reason why is the chances of passing all four stages of the FDA process is pretty freaking small.
Each of the 35 compounds in this fictional company is its own little company. To determine the annual profitability of the big pharma, the management looks at each compound, evaluates competing compounds with different methods of action under development at rival firms, sizes up the chances of the compound being effective, and if they have doubts, they’ll just whack that drug in mid-development.
They do this because the revenue window for any blockbuster is 10 years, and only 10 years. To make matters worse, the rest of the world operates what is called a monopsony - the revese of a monopoly. Europe pools all of its buyers together and places one big order.
The US is the reverse, all their buyers buy on their own. This makes the US the only, the single, market in which a drug manufacturer, for only 10 years, can recover not just the cost of development, but the cost of the other 34 compounds still under development.
That’s right - typically it is one, or maybe two, drugs that are propping up a big pharma firm.
When the Army handed the blueprint for the anti-Aids therapy AZT to I forget who, they still had to pay the $550MM to go through the FDA ringer.
So, your $500 pill is subsidizing not just the rest of the compounds under development at the company the drug came from. No, you are also SUBSIDIZING the ability for the rest of the world to buy that very same pill for 1000’s of percent less than what you would pay.
Canada, for example, places one giant order for a big blockbuster drug. Every hospital gets their order from the Canadian government. This is why the assholes who live in WA and MI - gigantic bleeding ass liberals that they are - pop over the border to buy their drugs for way less over in Canada.
Now, just to make this a little worse, there are the drugs that are KNOWN TO BE EFFECTIVE AGAINST BROAD SPECTRUM OF CANCERS AND VIRUSES, yet are not available because the drug is ‘public domain’ - as a compound, it can’t be patented. It’s therapeutic usage can be patented, but those patents are very weak, and defeated relatively easily in court.
As such, the drug DCA will NEVER BE AVAILABLE TO YOU, EVEN THOUGH IT KILLS A TON OF DIFFERENT CANCERS. Nobody is going to put up the $500 to $900 to get it through the FDA process when you can’t recover that cost in the open market.
So, consider all the people in your family that were killed by cancer in the last five years, and then look up DCA and find out about which cancers it has been demonstrated to be effective against, and which not.
“Awww, that’s BS. How do they know that this drug is effective against cancers and lots of different viruses, when no FDA studies have been done?”
Well, lots of studies have been done, and because of the ‘method of action’ of this drug, it takes a very simple and radical approach to killing the cancer.
Every cell in your body has the ability to undergo what is called apoptosis, or ‘cell suicide’. When a cell’s RNA is compromised, a chemical signal goes out to the bit in the cell that causes the cell to kill itself. Cancers and viruses like Hemhorragic Fever have developed an ability to cut off that chemical signal prior to the cell killing itself.
This turns the cell into a manufacturing plant for more viruses or cancer cells.
DCA restores the ability of the cell to kill itself, stopping the metastasis of the cancer, or the spreading of the virus, before it can begin.
You will never be able to buy this drug as it stands today. You can go to other countries and obtain the therapy there, but never in the USA.
So, there you go. Any questions?
They'll be replaced by those with little or no insurance, little or no retirement pensions, and no employment medical benefits.
Few will ever be able to afford heathcare, let alone all these expensive big pharma medications.
Cancer’s one thing, a real disease. J&J’s drug, Risperdal, and its Classmate Atypical antipsychotics do not cure Anything, nor can they legally claim to cure anything. and FDA told J&J in Dec ‘93 just before they approved it that FDA would consider it a violation of the FDCA for J&J to advertise of promote it as being safer or more effective than the older typical antipsychotics.
http://psychrights.org/Drugs/AllenJonesTMAPJanuary20.pdf
(pg 23)
“1. One in every 145 patients who entered the trials died, and yet those deaths were never mentioned in the scientific literature.
2. The trials were structured to favor the Atypicals and most of the study reports were discounted by the FDA as being biased.
3. One in every thirty-five patients in Risperdal trials experienced a serious adverse event, defined by the FDA as a life threatening event or one that required hospitalization.
4. Twenty-two percent of patients in Zyprexa trials suffered serious adverse events
5. The Atypicals did not demonstrate superior effectiveness or safety over Typical antipsychotics.
It is important to note that a drug company does not have to prove that a new drug is safer or more effective than an old drug to gain FDA approval. Essentially, the manufacturer has to demonstrate that the drug is proved to yield better results than placebo in a statistically significant number of patients in short-term trials (6-8 weeks). “
1 in 35 patients, back to the ER or the morgue.
Yes, it is expensive ginning up a loser into a blockbuster, no denying it, especially when the product is such a pig that the makers have to hire out of work Star Trek writers to put Lipstick on it.
“The costs must include writing patient information at 5th grade levels.”
You’re being overly charitable.
http://www.medpagetoday.com/ProductAlert/Prescriptions/15639
40% of the Docs prescribing drugs are also too lazy or stupid to read the label.
This was a question about what they knew at the time, not whether they could or would read the label. I had no clue about valproic acid. But I haven’t treated mania in 20 years. I’d look it up when and if I needed it.
Using cafe pharma is the equivalent of using democratic underground to represent the political views of the US populace. That is why I lolololol.
Using cafe pharma gives your credibility a real hit. I’ll look at the other stuff.
So are you saying that manic depression and schizophrenia are not real diseases because they cannot be cured but only “managed?”
Will using Bloomberg also give my credibility a hit?
Merck admitted they killed 3,468 people with Vioxx by paying their survivors off. They broke the law by violating marketing regs and rules that apply Expressly to drug makers, in order to oversell Vioxx. Then our Heroic People’s DOJ fined them $950 Million and let them plead out to a Misdemeanor Marketing Infraction, because any Felony that threatens the Medicare program’s solvency shuts them Out of it for 5 years.
No matter How many laws these companies break, and How many people they knowingly Kill while knowingly breaking those laws, it’s always a Misdemeanor and a Fine.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-07-27/merck-paid-3-468-death-claims-to-resolve-vioxx-suits.html
after they admitted those deaths were their fault and that they broke the law in the process.
Now I’ll admit that the literacy level at CafePharma often needs a spell checker, and that it would have more teeth if the posters weren’t All named Anonymous, but considering the way they have at their companies/bosses is it any Wonder they don’t sign their names?
“So are you saying that manic depression and schizophrenia are not real diseases because they cannot be cured but only “managed?”
You really want a degree correspondence course?
Manic Depression/Bipolar/Major Depression, Schizophrenia do not qualify as Diseases. If you want to go there, they remain, after hundreds of Billions of wasted research and Millions of Dead Patients, Opinions.
Brain Scans?
http://psychrights.org/articles/GEJacksonMDBrainScanCuriousConsensus.pdf
Hokum
Genetics?
http://www.councilforresponsiblegenetics.org/GeneWatch/GeneWatchPage.aspx?pageId=384
http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020212
Hokum
Antipsychotics/Antidepressants as a preventative/manager?
http://psychrights.org/research/Digest/NLPs/Lehmannneuroleptics-suicide2012.pdf
http://jannel.se/suicide.psychiatricdrugs.pdf
http://www.frontiersin.org/Evolutionary_Psychology/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00117/full
They’re among the most profitable drugs made because the patient is supposed to need them for life, and they cause suicides.
And the people defining the diagnosing are overwhelmingly bought and paid for, Industry shills.
http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.1001190
We have reported elsewhere on industry relationships with DSM-5 task force members [18]. Although the composition of the task force has changed slightly since its formation in 2007 (e.g., Pilecki et al. [19] found 72% of the members had ties in early 2011) industry relationships persist despite increased transparency. Currently, 69% of the DSM-5 task force members report having ties to the pharmaceutical industry.
And trying to manage those conditions is crippling and killing people wholesale.
Even the FDA has had such fits and starts over their complicity that they’ve recently moved the Drug Labels around making them harder to find.
This candid admission is from the 2005 Risperdal label.
“Suicide attempt was associated with discontinuation in 1.2% of RISPERDAL®-treated patients compared to 0.6% of placebo patients, but, given the almost 40-fold greater exposure time in RISPERDAL® compared to placebo patients, it is unlikely that suicide attempt is a RISPERDAL®-related adverse event, ….. “
That’s a 100% increase in people killing themselves following exposure to this drug which is sold to Prevent suicide.
But it’s probably not the drug’s fault?
Here’s the current label.
http://www.risperdal.com/prescribing.html
see sec 5.16 RE Suicide as an AE. FDA just recently rewrote it/toned it down.
And since the genetic research is coming up Zero, that refutes the brain chemical imbalance theory too. It would require defective genes to produce a transmittable from parents propensity for the brain chemicals dopamine, norepinephrine and serotonin to become unbalanced.
Medicine can’t even establish a base line normal of those chemicals in a living human brain, because they’re in a constant state of active flux. It takes an autopsy to measure them as unbalanced, and autopsies discover all kinds of brain damage in people who take those drugs.
http://psychrights.org/states/alaska/CaseXX/3AN-08-493PS/JacksonOnNLtoxicity.pdf
Antidepressants? The garbage doesn’t put brain chemicals back in balance.
http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.0030240
Antidepressants Create abnormal brain states/balances.
http://www.ssristories.com/
Sorry Statered. It isn’t personal. But this industry has an Awful lot of Lethal, Very Expensive fraud to answer for.
Liability and government regulations add a lot to the overhead. Huge payouts for unforeseen side effects are a very real possibility.
Non recognition of intellectual property rights in Canada, China and India means that the bulk of the cost for developing innovative new medicines is born by the American consumer.
Let’s not kid ourselves here, science isn’t certainty. This society has become so failure averse, and as a result, so risk intolerant, that nothing really bold is underway anymore.
Why take a chance when a pack of flesh-eating tort shysters will wreck your company? Not that they did a single thing for the permanent benefit of humanity in their entire miserable lives.
Brain science? That’s an oxymoron. Nobody knows anything about the brain, and if they do they are lying. It’s like magnetism. It’s ‘FM’. F***ing Magic.
They feed people things, watch what happens, and then indicate it for psych disorders. What works for one guy, doesn’t for the other. The one’s it works for scream bloody murder if they can’t get it. The other half want to sue.
Science, brain or otherwise, is Science. Fraud is not Science.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/medicatedchild/
These Psych crackpots have been propping the same idiotic theories for over a century now. The knowledge base itself for determining that Psych diagnoses are discrete, label-able malfunctions is still ripped right out of the ears of seance suckers, Nazi worshippers, and Godless, scatterbrained, New Age blockheads.
The economic devastation alone these Snake Oil Peddlers are causing us is off the charts. If those flesh-eating tort shysters wreck your company for selling brain eating, 100%, defective, proven crap, then they’ve done Everyone a huge service no matter How much money they make or What their motivation is.
1 out of 15 young people, Ruined for life. Cost to everyone else?
$1 Million for EACH of those 1 in 15 in lifetime SSI/SSDI payments.
Pg 245
The Disability Numbers
There are no good studies yet on the percentage of “early onset” bipolar patients when they reach adulthood, end up on the SSI and SSDI disability rolls. However, the astonishing jump in the number of “severely mentally ill” children receiving SSI speaks volumes about the havoc that is being wreaked. There were 16,200 Psychiatrically disabled youth under 18 years old on the SSI rolls in 1987, and they comprised less than 6 percent of the total number of disabled children. Twenty years later, there were 561,569 disabled mentally ill children on the SSI rolls, and they comprised 50 percent of the total. This epidemic is even hitting preschool children. The prescribing of psychotropic drugs to two-year-olds and three-year-olds began to become more commonplace about a decade ago, and sure enough, the number of severely mentally ill children under 6 years of age receiving SSI has tripled since then, rising from 22,453 in 2000 to 65,928 in 2007 (98)
Moreover, the SSI numbers only begin to hint at the scope of the harm being done. Everywhere there is evidence of a worsening of the mental health of children and teenagers. From 1995 to 1999, psychiatric-related Emergency Room visits by children increased 59 percent. (99)
The deteriorating mental health of the nation’s children, declared U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher in 2001, constituted a “health crisis.” (100) Next, colleges were suddenly wondering why so many of their students were suffering manic episodes or behaving in disturbed ways; a 2007 survey discovered that one in six college students had deliberately “cut or burned self” in the prior year. (101) All of this led the U.S. Government Accountability Office to investigate what was going on, and it reported in 2008 that one in every fifteen young adults, eighteen to twenty-six years old, is now “seriously mentally ill”. There are 680,000 in that age group with bipolar disorder and another 800,000 ill with major depression, and, the GAO noted, this was in fact an undercount of the problem, as it didn’t include young adults who were homeless, incarcerated, or institutionalized.
That is where we stand as a nation today. Twenty years ago our society began regularly prescribing psychiatric drugs to children and adolescents, and now one out of every fifteen Americans enters adulthood with a “serious mental illness.” That is proof of the most tragic sort that our drug based paradigm of care is doing a great deal more harm than good. The medicating of children and youth became commonplace only a short time ago, and already it has put millions onto a path of lifelong illness.
98: Social Security Administration, annual statistical reports on the SSI program, 1996-2008, Social Security Bulletin, Annual Statistical Supplement, 1988-1992
99: Pediatric Academic Societies, Pediatric Psychiatric admissions on the rise,” May 16, 2000 press release
100: D. Satcher, Report of Surgeon General’s Conference on Children’s Mental Health (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 2001).
101: B. Whitford: “Depression, eating disorders and other mental illnesses are on the rise, Newsweek, August 27, 2008
Even the VA admits these drugs are worthless.
http://www.mirecc.va.gov/visn3/education.asp
“Algorithms:
A review of existing algorithms, including VA National Guidelines, APA, the Texas Medication Algorithm Project (TMAP), and PORT was conducted. After careful consideration, a modified version of TMAP was selected, and named the New Jersey Algorithm.
The sequence includes two trials of atypical antipsychotics followed by a Clozaril trial. If no favorable response is observed, a third atypical neuroleptic is tried, followed by a typical neuroleptic, followed by a combination of antipsychotic medications. The consensus of the internal advisory committee was to provide a flexible algorithm that will allow for minor modifications as new research is disseminated. Though a positive outcome has not been observed with the NJ Algorithm to date, researchers suspect that a larger sample size might generate significant findings in the future.”
“Though a Positive Outcome has not been observed with the New Jersey Algorithm to date.”
That’s with All of the drugs, not just one or two of them. Half a Century of this brain eating filth, both new and old.
Wreck your Company?
Excuse me while I get a box of Kleenex and cry your company a river.
Knowing, Intentional Fraud is not Science.
We got a letter from a man who had been bedridden for years with arthritis. His doctor prescribed our new drug (had just been FDA approved). He said that within three days he was up and around and cook his own meals. (Think about that for a minute.)
What was the name of that drug?
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