Political Forum - View Single Post - How 5 Capitalist Democracies actually tackle health care

DanteAugustusGermanicus · #43 (**permalink**) 06-25-2008, 03:06 AM

psst, I'm not anti drug company or profit...I am pro truth and openess so we can discuss what is really what.

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Originally Posted by SuperDinoYoshi

If you are intersted in having new drugs developed, don't encourage things that cut the profits from the market, or else investors will find something better to do with their millions.

investors drive all research?

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Originally Posted by SuperDinoYoshi

Average Drug company spends 4 billion on advertising. That's quite a sum, but its dwarfed by the 50 billion they spend on R&D, I don't really care if you think the drugs make themselves, the fact of the matter is they don't.

I know how drugs are developed/made. I know a few things about the drug companies.

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GSK faces action in the US where bereaved families have joined together to sue the company.

As a result, GSK has been forced to open its confidential internal archive.

Karen Barth Menzies is a partner in one of the firms representing many of the families.

She has examined thousands of the documents which are stored, box upon box, in an apartment in Malibu, California.

She said: "Even when they have negative studies that show that this drug Seroxat is going to harm some kids they still spin that study as remarkably effective and safe for children."

GSK's biggest clinical trial of Seroxat on children was held in the US in the 1990s and called Study 329.

Child psychiatrist Dr Neal Ryan of the University of Pittsburgh was paid by GSK as a co-author of Study 329.

In 2002 he also gave a talk on childhood depression at a medical conference sponsored by GSK.

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“What we really found was laws aren’t working,” said study author Joseph Ross, of the geriatrics department of Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York.

“To designate every payment made as a trade secret … seems improbable,” he said.

Pharmaceutical companies have been known to give doctors extravagant gifts including all-expense-paid vacations or gourmet dinners as part of their marketing campaigns. According to Dr. Harlan Krumholz, an associate professor at the Yale University School of Medicine, this presents a conflict of interest that the public should know about.

Ross agrees. “If both parties think this payment is appropriate, then this information should be made available to the public,” he said.

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Originally Posted by SuperDinoYoshi

What corporation has a Advertising to R&D ratio better than that?

this may interest you for future ref, but...

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OTTAWA - Drug companies spend almost twice as much on marketing and promoting their products than on research and development, says a new study.

In their analysis of data from two market research companies, Marc-Andre Gagnon and Joel Lexchin of Toronto's York University found that American drug companies spent US$57.5 billion on promotional activities in 2004.

By comparison, spending on industrial pharmaceutical research and development in the United States was $31.5 billion in the same year, according to a report by the National Science Foundation, which included public funding for industrial research.

The types of marketing included in the US$57.5 billion figure, compiled using data from market research companies IMS and CAM, included free samples, direct-to-consumer drug advertising, meetings between company representatives and doctors to promote products, e-mail promotions and direct mail, said the study.

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The Bad and the Profitable – Pushing the Big Pharma Agenda

I believe in capitalism and free markets. I don’t think health care and medicine should be in the hands of government. Not a very liberal point of view, but that’s just my opinion. For the record, I’ve never seen Sicko, not that it should matter.

But somewhere medicine stopped being about the common good. The “free market” of medicine is not free at all. It can’t be free when the there are more than 2 pharmaceutical lobbyists for every 1 member of Congress. It can’t be free when the pharmaceutical industry spends more than any other industry on its lobbying efforts. ($758 million since 1998 as of 2005)(1)

And this is my problem with the pharmaceutical industry, and it should be yours. This is the point I was trying to make in the previous article. There is plenty of good work being done in medicine, but it is being exploited and abused by those in control. Like when a drug to treat severe depression is marketed to the general public, so it can hook those with low self-esteem or those going through a rough patch in their lives to a habit forming pill. Promoting the common good has taken a backseat promoting a company’s bottom line. From USA Today(2):

Over the years those lobbyists have been very successful, demonstrating that the industry knows politics as well as it knows chemistry. Drug companies won coverage for prescription drugs under Medicare in 2003 while blocking the government from negotiating prices downward. They have so far kept out imports of cheaper medicines from Canada and other countries. And they have protected a system that uses company fees to speed the drug-approval process.

“They win more than they should,” says James Love, an industry critic who is director of the non-profit Consumer Project on Technology. “The one thing they have going for them is money.”