I suppose that most of his have problems paying for prescription drugs can be a problem. My Medicare advantage solved mine for most of the year, but a little over two months ago, I fell into the donut hole. $600 for one med hurts, but many are in far worse shape than I. This reminded me that there is so much more to do to finish with health care reform. The following editorial describes ways in which Big Pharma rips you off.
1. Astroturf Patients?
Pharma promotes fake patient advocacy groups [Murdoch delinked] to lobby for its interests…
2. Cheating the Government
Pharma is now a top defrauder of the federal government. …
3. Trials and Fibulations
Presiding over clinical trials can make a doctor thousands per patient…
4. More Trials and Fibulations
Even without fraud, pharma-sponsored studies can deceive…
5. Overseas Adventurism
As pharma increasingly eyes poorer countries for new markets and cheaper manufacturing it also eyes them for cheaper clinical trials…
6. Clueless Institutional Review Boards
Institutional review boards, charged with overseeing clinical trials, should catch the unsafe drugs and shady trials [they don’t]…
7. ‘Previous Government Experience Desirable’
…the government is fighting itself...
8. Double Dealing at the Pharmacy
The best thing that ever happened to pharma (after direct-to-consumer advertising) is Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs)…
9. FDA Foreplay
A sneaky way pharma tries to get FDA to approve a drug — even when the science isn’t there – is to float the drug to the public…
10. Pharma Service Announcements
Public service announcements are messages for your own good, like, "Do You Know the Seven Warning Signs of Cancer?"… [emphasis original]
Inserted from <Alternet>
I strongly encourage you to click through to the original article. I gave you just a snippet of each of the first ten ways, and the last five are even more egregious than these. It’s well worth the read.
Now, it may seem strange to talk about more reform now, when for the next two years, we’ll be fighting to keep what little we got, but now is not the time to go on defense. Only by continuing to fight for the positive things America needs can we educate more Americans for the future.
5 Responses to “How Big Pharma Rips You Off!”
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Major-league bought off too, to get their HCR buy in. Whatta ya gonna do, I can cry about it but it ain’t gonna change nothin’, it is what it is.
Oso, I agree. Pharma reform was left out and needs doing.
If I start have to worry about a donut hole then when I hit the hole I quit taking my insulin ($330 per 1000ml bottle and I use 6 bottles per month) and will continue to cop my generic pain drugs at generic prices. So fuck ’em it’s a death panel writ large by Pharmaceutical companies not the HCR bill.
The Health Care businesses always were the death panels.