Date posted: May 10, 2007 - Thursday
Title: The New Drug Kingpins
Current mood: irritated
Move over Arellano Félix there is a new drug kingpin in this country.
And this is one bad group of muthafuckers. One hundred bosses calling the shots and thousands and thousands of foot soldiers to enforce their commands. An unrelenting attitude they are right in every respect and an unwillingness to listen to facts, opinions or arguments against what they want.
And just who are these terrors who will force their will on the American people?
The US Senate.
On Tuesday these pushers again showed their complete disdain for the welfare and concerns of the American public by defeating a section of the new FDA legislation which would have allowed the importation of inexpensive prescription drugs into the United States.
God forbid granny should have to pay less than the maximum for her blood pressure medicine or her heart medicine. Johnson & Johnson, Eli Lilly, Squib and Merck have to have their pound of flesh and the US Senate is there to make sure it they get it. And the Senators rake in their cut in the form of campaign contributions.
Perhaps the most irritating of the specious reasons for not allowing the importation of inexpensive drugs is the posturing that it is for the protection of the American consumer. It seems only the US drug companies can get the formulas for these drugs correct and all the other countries that make them are cooking them up in bathtub labs with suspicious ingredients that will harm or kill US consumers. Or that is the picture the Senators paint as they turn down the cheap drug option.
One of most galling of statements came from Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss. who cited a New York Times article about a contaminated medicine that came from China. My response, "Look, stupid, we are talking about drugs made in Canada and European countries, not some rice-paddy sweat shop in Nan King."
And if the refusal to give the American consumer a break was not bad enough on Tuesday, on Wednesday my local paper had another front-page article on drugs.
Seems like two companies, Amgen and Johnson & Johnson are paying doctors millions of dollars a year to prescribe their anemia drugs. And the kicker is regulators are currently considering the safety of this drug in the dosage that is usually prescribed because it can shorten the lives of the patients taking it. The drug is usually prescribed for patients with kidney disease or taking chemotherapy; and prescribed to the tune of $10 billion a year. This drug represents the single biggest drug expense for Medicare.
The health care system in this country is a joke (and a very sick joke -- pun intended) and the US Senate and their compatriots in the House can't seem to get it through their heads they need to do something to straighten things out. They need to stop thinking about the nice campaign contributions they are getting from drug companies and health care companies and think about the voters that put them in those padded
