Free Republic

Food or life-saving medication? With prescription drug prices skyrocketing for over a decade now, more Americans are having to decide between paying for food or paying for their life-saving medication.  It was the case for Marjorie Prunty, a senior from Missouri, whose dinner comes from dusty cans in the back of her garage. It’s all she can afford to eat in order to pay for her insulin. And Prunty isn’t alone. She’s part of the nearly 25 percent of Americans who struggle to pay for their prescription drugs. The rising cost of prescription drugs, particularly insulin, has many Americans rationing their medication—which can be...

Cystic fibrosis patients just got some life-changing news. The FDA approved Trikafta, a breakthrough therapy for the disease, which causes a life-threatening buildup of mucus in the lungs and digestive tract. Before Trikafta, most patients didn't have any treatment options. And more drug innovation is on the way. Right now, there are 1,120 cancer therapies, 132 Alzheimer's drugs, and 200 treatments for heart disease and stroke in the works. We have America's strong intellectual property laws to thank for these budding breakthroughs. Drug development is risky. It takes more than a decade and $2.6 billion, on average, to bring one...

When General Motors and Ford sell more cars, they are involved in more accidents. They undoubtedly advertise more in those places where they sell more cars. Does that mean that the car companies are responsible for additional accidents in those places? That they are purposefully plotting to create more accidents?

This country's healthcare system is a mess. Not a mess like the British NHS, but a mess, nonetheless. The price of prescription drugs is one aspect that has gotten out of control. Many Americans forgo needed medicine because they can't afford it, and the projected 3.8% increase in drug prices expected during 2020 isn't going to make matters any better. Unsurprisingly, government regulations have helped unlock human greed. For example, over a six-year period (2011-2016) according to CNN, Medicare spent $2 billion on the drug Acthar, a medication used to treat seizures in infants. CNN is now reporting that...

Three of the lawmakers who will lead the House next year as Congress focuses on skyrocketing drug costs are among the biggest recipients of campaign contributions from the pharmaceutical industry, a new KHN analysis shows. On Wednesday, House Democrats selected Rep. Steny Hoyer of Maryland to serve as the next majority leader and Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina as majority whip, making them the No. 2 and No. 3 most powerful Democrats as their party regains control of the House in January. Both lawmakers have received more than $1 million from pharmaceutical company political action committees in the past...

President Donald Trump continues to address the American people’s practical needs. Now, he is out to reduce drug costs with his latest initiative “American Patients First.” Barack Obama recognized there was a health care problem. But he took the wrong action by pushing through Congress legislation that dramatically raised the cost of health insurance and reduced the medical choices for many Americans. After making the health care problem worse, the Left fixated on pharmaceutical costs. And prices are too high. Noted Alex Azar II, the Secretary of Health and Human Services: “This burden has become a threat to the...

In his State of the Union address in January and again in New Hampshire in March, President Trump made a bold promise: “You’ll be seeing drug prices falling very substantially in the not-too-distant future,” he said, “and it’s going to be beautiful.” Not if the pharmaceutical companies can stop it. Big Pharma is pouring money into a lobbying campaign to thwart any serious efforts to rein in prescription drug prices ahead of a presidential speech this month where Mr. Trump plans to lay out his drug pricing proposals. “There is apprehension across the industry,” said Bruce Artim, who retired recently...

2018 has barely finished dawning, and already, the pharmaceutical industry once more has egg on its face from outrageous price hikes. This time, the culprit is pharmaceutical startup NextSource, which apparently has taken a 40-year-old cancer drug known as lomustine, and ruthlessly hiked its price from $50/pill in 2013, to $768/pill now. In other words, they’ve raised the price of the drug by over 1400% over the past five years. NextSource’s defense for why this has happened has to be read to be believed. CBS News reports that the company’s CEO, Robert DiCrisci, claims that the company set the price based on the...

Monday was Columbus Day, or as liberals have taken to calling, “Indigenous People’s Day.” Democrats love sowing division, blaming Europeans for all of the world’s ills, and elevating the status of Native Americans. Well, they usually do. When it’s a choice between a long-dead Italian guy and American Indians, the choice is easy. When the choice is between their own reelection and anything, everything else loses to self-preservation.Such is the case with Missouri Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill.One of my first jobs in Washington was as a health policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation. While it may not sound exciting, it...

The bipartisan Washington, DC “consensus” has so many blind spots, you’d think its exponents lived in a black box. Recently, it has become clear that one of the biggest of those blind spots is the federal government’s treatment of the pharmaceutical industry.This can be most clearly seen in the troubling continuity between the favored policy of pharma-friendly elements within the Trump administration, and the Obama administration’s own weakness on a critical policy in the battle over drug prices: namely, the 340B drug pricing program.As granular followers of pharmaceutical policy will already know, 340B is a program passed during the first...

It seems too good to be true. A simple and inexpensive treatment for one of the most dreadful conditions around: sepsis. Also known as blood poisoning, sepsis strikes one million Americans every year, killing one-fourth of them. Dr. Paul Marik, chief of pulmonary and critical care at Eastern Virginia Medical School, came up with the idea on little more than a whim. His patient, 48-year-old Valerie Hobbs, was succumbing to sepsis and he had run out of options to save her. It was a desperation shot in the dark: Vitamin C. It worked. Beautifully. Again and again. Valerie spent a...

Sanders speaking, 1:37:34 into video: "What's going on? What's going on is the pharmaceutical industry owns the United States Congress. And in all fairness, I will admit, it's not just Republicans. They have a huge influence over the Democratic Party as well."

WASHINGTON—Passage of legislation aimed at speeding up Food and Drug Administration approvals, combined with an incoming president who has pledged to “cut red tape” at the agency, is expected to usher in a new, more industry-friendly era of drug and device regulation. The Senate on Wednesday cleared the measure known as the 21st Century Cures bill, which lays out in detail speedier and more pro-industry methods for the FDA to approve new drugs and medical devices. Its supporters, such as PhRMA, the drug-industry association, and AdvaMed, representing device makers, praise it as a way to bring about more innovation and...

If you want to see corporate welfare and cronyism in action, there is no better place to look than the pharmaceutical industry. Having more or less treated Obamacare as a wishlist, then hired the architect behind it, then turned Hillary Clinton into their personal puppet, Big Pharma has less shame about gaming the system than Clinton does about using Bleachbit. But however repulsive pharma's behavior is, there is one bright side to it. At a certain point, corruption becomes a problem not merely from an ethics standpoint, but because corrupt companies become blind to the very market signals that tell...

While many Americans rightly have concerns about the affordability of some medicines, the evidence has always shown that government solutions are the wrong way to go. People are living longer and healthier and many previously debilitating and incurable diseases are now better managed, and sometimes cured. That is made possible thanks to a culture of innovation in this country where people and companies, both large and small, spend valuable time and resources researching, testing and ultimately bringing life-saving drugs to market. However, when government dictates prices or tilts the playing field towards certain players that will only discourage that investment...

One of the most popular punching bags on the presidential campaign trail this year is America’s bio-pharmaceutical industry. Bashing drug companies was telegraphed early on as a key Democratic strategy to shift the blame for the failure of Obamacare to contain health care costs away from the Democratic/insurance industry alliance that wrote the law. Unfortunately, their policy proposals, designed to suppress drug prices, are likely to cause far more harm than good. Consider efforts by President Obama, supported by Hillary Clinton, to undermine the market-based pricing in Medicare Part D to pay for other government spending. My organization joined 25...

Last month, news came down the pike from the Harvard Business Review that should bring despair to the hearts of any honest defender of capitalism. As reported by American Enterprise Institute (AEI) blogger James Pethokoukis, the Harvard story, authored by Boston University economist James Bessen, found that growing corporate profitability is increasingly coming from investments not in benevolent, market-friendly costs such as research and development, but rather in augmented lobbying to shut out competition. In short, it is now more profitable to use Washington to stop people from building something new than to actually build it yourself.If a more devastating...

One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.—Milton Friedman The story of the 340B discount drug program is a classic example of a government program that has been hijacked. Established by the Veterans Healthcare Act of 1992, 340B was intended to give veterans and the indigent discounted drugs. Pharmaceutical companies could sell through to government veterans programs but had to offer a small amount of drugs at costs to help poor and indigent vets. According to the program’s requirements, covered entities must not resell or otherwise transfer 340B drugs to...

Recently, a very revealing exchange took place between Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Turing Pharmaceuticals executive Michael Smith. Now, for those who don’t remember, Turing Pharmaceuticals is the company led by notorious shark and price gouger Martin Shkreli, who is currently under investigation by the FBI for securities fraud. Shkreli became infamous for raising the price of the antiparasitic drug Daraprim from $13.50 per pill to $750 per pill. Even the BBC marveled at how this single act had made Shkreli “the most hated man in America.” In other words, if you wanted to find an example of pharmaceutical executives...

Recently, alarming news for those advocating for a sensible health care policy arrived courtesy of Politico Pro: The pharmaceutical industry spent more than $50 million on lobbying last year alone. And, if you can believe this, that's an increase from 2014. To be fair, 2015 was not a good year for pharma. Martin Shkreli, the bad-boy hedge fund CEO who hiked a drug price from just under $14 to $750 per pill, became known as the "face of U.S. Health Care," to quote an Atlantic story that ran around the time of his decision. And the drug industry seems to...