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.

"Am I wrong?"--"Am I Nuts?"--"What do you think?"--"Do you agree?"

What’s It Take? RICO?

George Lundberg, MD, a physician and medical journalist, has a fresh approach to deal with outrageous practices by the pharmaceutical companies, RICO. In an opinion piece in Med Page Today he points out that a $3 billion dollar fine Glaxo Smith Kline (GSK) has agreed to pay is probably a fraction of the profit generated by the no-nos that triggered the fine.

In published reports GSK is said to have poured huge bucks into goodies for doctors, delivered by those well-dressed attractive professionals who whisk into your doc’s office with their sample case in tow, while you wait for hours to see the doc. They have tons of neat stuff, vacations meetings in exotic locations, dinners, speaking engagements with fat fees, prime seats at entertainment events, and on, and on. Of course most of this is out of bounds according to their industry code, but GSK reportedly ignored the rules as some of the pharma giants do.

GSK is said to have used the access thus gained to promote drugs for uses outside FDA approved boundaries. Once a drug is on the market doctors aren’t limited to its approved uses; they can prescribe it for anything they choose. Pharmas take advantage of this loophole to increase sales of their drugs. GSK is said to have pushed this opening to the limits, including in one case urging docs to prescribe a drug not approved for children, teens and young adults because in clinical trials the drug had triggered a small number of this demographic to become suicidal. Adults became suicidal in small numbers on this drug as well. However, suicidal kids and teens are not at all the same thing; they are already too prone to dark thoughts.

Are fines or industry codes going to reduce the level of bribery some pharmas practice? A practice that’s illegal everywhere except New Zealand and the USA. Pharmas pour billions into marketing in America; more than three-quarters of it into an effort to influence the drugs doctors prescribe. To be fair, many docs do not allow the pharma hustlers into their office. But too many welcome them and happily accept their bribes goodies even though they will swear these pharma bribes goodies have no effect on the scripts they write,,,,,, yea, right.

It is obvious that fines do not work; the pharmas look at them as a “cost of doing business.” What is it going to take to put a stop to these outrageous practices? Dr. Lundberg suggests that we recognize this scourge for what it is, racketeering, and go after those responsible –top pharma executives, maybe some docs– under the RICO Act. If these egregious activities threatened to trigger some serious jail time for the “Dons” of the pharmaceutical world, we’re pretty sure they would clean up their act. And we would all be much the better for it.

In fact, if the ethically challenged leaders in several sectors of our economy were to face RICO charges for their shenanigans, we would all be much the better for it.  For openers think LIBOR and rigging bond auctions.