Pharmaceutical companies are inventing diseases to sell more drugs, researchers have warned.more ...
If we invent diseases, and then make people pay us to cure them, we can make a lot of money [BBC News]
Pharmaceutical companies are inventing diseases to sell more drugs, researchers have warned.more ...
Don't. Get. Me. Started.
ReplyDeleteWhen the drug companies hire former cheerleaders (and yes, they really do hire former cheerleaders) to park themselves in waiting rooms as drug company reps, launch ad campaigns about the agony of restless legs (?!) and so forth, it really points to some serious basic flaws in how our privatized health care system is working.
After all, what's wrong with just letting doctors read the medical journals? That's one of the things they went to school to learn how to do.
Paul Krugman did an excellent piece in the recent NYRB on the subject as it relates to the insurance side of things. Thanks to our frankly bizarre system, we pay about 33% for privatized bureucratic overhead on the insurance side of things, whereas the norm in industrialized countries is 15% for administrative costs under the much more efficient single-payer model. And we get less care on average.
And that doesn't even factor in the salaries for all those waiting room cheerleaders.
Damn. I told you not to get me started.
Meanwhile...
ReplyDelete...we try to import our medications from Canada rather than pay the highest prices on the planet for stuff everyone else in the world is getting at lower cost, since our system puts the pharmaceutical companies in the catbird seat when it comes to negotiating durg prices.
Okay, I'm stopping now. I really don't want to get started.
in all honesty we've known this for years that drug companies make shit so the can cure it later on who cares who dies or if you drive in your sleep... its fucked up, now i'm scared to take tussin!
ReplyDeleteyou better be glad you are assimilated otherwise i would hate you and want you out of MY country. know you place and show me some respect.
ReplyDeleteI was going on about imaginary diseases just recently and ranting to all and sundry that restless leg syndrome syndrome was the product of some pharmaceutical company marketing knob.
ReplyDeleteJust goes to show....that I am a genius, as are you.
But me first.
Smoochies.
This just goes to show that if I have symptoms, it is a disease--if you have symptoms it's just your imagination.
ReplyDeleteI had restless leg when I was pregnant. I didn't even know it was a disease, but it kept me up at night. Would I take a poisonous drug to get rid of it? No. Was it life-threatening? No.
Don't confuse a serious disease with a minor ailment--but both exist. If a drug can alleviate it, and is shown not to do harm, what's the problem?
Not hating on people with restless legs.:-)
ReplyDeleteIt's just that there are some serious illnesses out there requiring some serious treatments, and although our country can afford it, too many people are going without important care.
A few years back, a study indicated that about 19,000 people in this country die each year due to lack of medical insurance.
Poor people end up neglecting preventive care because they can't afford it, then they wind up in the emergency room (the most expensive possible way to treat a problem) when things get too bad to endure.
And the current model fails us in other ways. Since vaccinations prevent problems that might occur after the patient has switched to another insurance provider, none of the providers cover vaccinations, although it's clearly more cost effective for the patient and the system. But what's good for the patient and the system is not necessarily good for the individual insurance company, and that's why the privatized system is so inefficient.
So, our system somehow can't find the money to cover vaccines, but we're able to pay all these drug company cheerleaders to sit in waiting rooms.
And meanwhile, HIV patients send emails back and forth to try to scrounge up leftover medications.
It's insane. You'd think we were living in a developing country, not one of the richest industrialized nations on the planet.
Oops, sorry. Got started again.