Published in CommPRO.biz 2014.01.24

 

Big Pharma Has Congress 

by the Jugular

Andrew Witty, Glaxo Smith Kline CEO, announced last month (December 16) that Glaxo will stop paying doctors to promote their products and stop paying their sales representatives based on the number of prescriptions doctors write. It would be nice to think that this action results from an epiphany on Glaxo’s part. It’s more likely a duck-and-cover move triggered by a nasty bribery mess in China and an upcoming Affordable Care Act disclosure requirement.

It is, however, welcome. This, we hope, will trigger moves (don’t hold your breath) by other Pharma Monsters to fall in line. Pay-to-prescribe -along with Pharma advertising- make up two of the more egregious practices Pharma uses that drive healthcare costs sky high in the United States. The biggie by far is the hold they have on our Congress. Their “K” Street lobbyists lay bucks by the bushel on members of the Congress. In return, those sworn to work in our interest instead work for the drug companies.

By manipulating patent laws and exempting Pharma from anti-trust laws, drug companies have driven costs for their products beyond belief. A drug that costs a few hundred dollars to make, costs a desperate cancer patient close to a hundred grand for each dose. The patient goes bankrupt and the taxpayers pick up the tab. There is no other drug. The doctor says take it or die.

Pharma would have us believe that these drugs cost over a billion dollars to bring to market. A cruel and blatant lie; a study published in the British Medical Journal shows that the average $1.3 billion dollars the drug companies claim it costs, is actually about $90 thousand dollars. The rest is part BS and mostly marketing expenditures. Worse, most of their research funds go to tweaking existing drugs in an effort to stretch out patents on their best sellers.

We keep hearing about how much cheaper it is to buy drugs in places like Canada. Why is that? Because they have a single payer healthcare system that negotiates lower prices. In America, our Congress has forbidden Medicare to do anything like that. So a nation with fewer people than live in California can muscle the drug companies and we can’t. To make it worse the Congress has so limited fraud investigative funds that Medicare catches only a fraction of the bad guys. Like one doc in California who games the system by prescribing name-brand drugs to thousands of low income patients. Drugs’ costing as much as 30 times equally effective generic versions. There are thousands of these docs milking Medicare for Big Pharma and costing the taxpayers billions.

Big Pharma’s pill bill is killing us. Government controlled healthcare serves over half of Americans. With that kind of clout we can negotiate lower costs. Lower costs in drugs, lower costs in every aspect of our out-of-control healthcare sector. We spend more per-capita than any other nation on earth and yet our outcomes don’t even rank in the top 25%. We need to clean out the Congressional medicine chest.

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