What was the deal? Was Rumsfeld behind it?
Marxist claptrap.
“and creating the opioid crisis by bribing doctors to prescribe the drugs”
Prescribed benzodiazapenes are a huge problem as well. It hasn’t made it to front and center yet. My wife has been living through that hell
IMHO, the Pharma Industry is just as big a scam as the Global Change Industry.
A monster created by its master.
2019 is also the year obamacare implodes. This is the last year of the individual mandate. It’s completely voluntary now.
2019 will be a very interesting year.
What kind of a part did Obama play in increasing the use of clinics to make Oxycontin more readily available to the masses? I seem to remember an article but the info escapes me now.
I probably could have gotten them overseas in Lower Slobovia for 200 bucks...you get my drift.
Leni
Mr. Holt is an idiot, which is why he can't explain how the pharmaceutical companies are responsible for deaths caused by fentanyl and heroin that are illicitly made and sold, that comes, mostly, from south of our border. Heroin and fentanyl account for the vast majority of deaths from opioid addiction/overdosing in this country. Opioid addiction does not routinely start with legal use. Deaths from prescribed opioids are a problem, but the majority of deaths from those come from diversion and illegal distribution. The increase in opioid overdose death rates is driven mostly by opioids like heroin and illicit fentanyl, not pain pills.
I (and, no doubt, millions of others) are alive today, thanks to certain products of big pharma. That fact tends to dampen my outrage at the prices. A lot.
One of the more manipulative, adjective-laden treatises you’ll see today.
ANOTHER PROGRESSIVE MYTH DEBUNKED: What the Prescription Drug Debate Gets Wrong. If we want new drugs for Alzheimer’s and the other ravages of old age, the last thing we need is European-style price controls at the pharmacy. But that’s the dream of Democrats, and the Trump administration is unfortunately threatening to go along with it.
This campaign is based on the same myth that was used to sell Obamacare: Americans are dying because their health-care system is an international disgrace. While it’s true that Canadians’ and western Europeans’ life expectancy is higher than Americans’, it’s not because of their price-controlled drugs and government health services. The gap is due to variables that have nothing to do with health-care systems: the higher rates in America of poverty, obesity, smoking, homicide, fatal accidents and other factors.
The gap would be even larger if it weren’t for the fact that Americans receive better health care, particularly for heart disease and cancer. And the chief reason that American patients fare better than European patients is that they get earlier access to more new drugs. A dollar spent on drugs does more to combat disease and disability than a dollar spent anywhere else.
Yes, Canadians and Europeans pay less at the pharmacy, but they’re getting what they pay for. Why would Trump want to copy them? He should look at the numbers. Americans already get a much better deal.
...
Zytiga hasn’t been as newsy, but it’s a worthier poster drug because it does reflect a widespread and fundamental problem with the European system. This prostate-cancer drug received brief attention in connection with Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the Libyan convicted of plotting the bombing of a Pan Am plane over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. He was sentenced to life in prison in Scotland but released in 2009. The release, which generated international outrage, was justified on compassionate grounds after British doctors determined that he had less than three months to live because his prostate cancer was “resistant to any treatment options of known effectiveness.”
After returning to Libya, he received treatments not offered in the United Kingdom, including Zytiga, a new drug that dramatically increased survival rates. It was developed by Johnson & Johnson and launched first in the United States, where al-Megrahi’s family reportedly procured it. Instead of dying within three months, he lived for almost three more years (generating more outrage). During that time, the British government rejected Zytiga as too expensive to be offered to patients in the National Health Service. Shortly after al-Megrahi’s death in 2012, the drug won approval for use by a limited number of patients in England, but it took another three years to be approved in Scotland, and even then, it was limited to a minority of men with prostate cancer (those who had already undergone other therapy). The frustration of the majority was summed up in 2016 by the Express newspaper in a headline: CANCER DRUG “GOOD ENOUGH FOR LOCKERBIE BOMBER” WILL NOT BE GIVEN TO SCOTS NHS PATIENTS.
Zytiga is not an isolated example. All kinds of patients die in Europe waiting for drugs already available to Americans. The hub of pharmaceutical innovation has moved from the price-controlled countries of Europe to the United States as companies have shifted laboratories and focus to the market with the best returns. America has been called the “Pharmacy to the World” because it’s where more than half of new drugs are developed and tested in clinical trials.
....
to put those prices in perspective, consider an international comparison published this year by Irene Papanicolas and colleagues at Harvard. Americans spend annually about $1,000 per capita on prescription drugs (of which $150 comes out of their pockets—the rest is covered by insurance). In other affluent countries, the per-capita spending ranges from about $300 in Australia and the Netherlands to about $800 in Switzerland (a distant second to America in developing new drugs). The annual figure is about $400 in the United Kingdom and Japan, $500 in Germany, France, and Sweden, and $600 in Canada and Denmark.
So the average difference between the U.S. and the other countries on drug spending is about $500 a year per person, hardly an astronomical sum to pay for better health, especially considering how much more money is spent in the rest of the health-care system.
Link: https://www.city-journal.org/price-controls-on-pharmaceuticals
The article denies consumer personal responsibility and assumes that drug producers should be monitoring the behavior of doctors. If the author really thinks the American pharmaceutical industry is evil, he should refuse to take any of the many beneficial drugs and pain relievers that have been developed by that industry.
Lol.. as long as hospital reimbursement is based on pain control, ala Obamacare, no. This from the leadership that can’t repeal Obamacare, fund and complete a wall. They are just distracting you from a few Trillion in chuck n Nancy deals.
More than a single illegal crossing the border is sheer capitulation or more likely complicity.