J&J, Merck, and Bristol Myers Squibb spend billions more on executives and stockholders than on R&D — Senate report points to greed and ‘patent thickets’ as key reasons for high prices::Senate report points to greed and “patent thickets” as key reasons for high prices.
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Behold the “efficiency” of market capitalism the self-serving economists love crowing about.
Efficient at making wealthy sociopaths richer for doing nothing, using the value of your labor, and nothing else.
Efficiency of capitalism is moving profits from the bottom to the top while expending the least amount of capital on products and employees.
The only people who treat capitalism like some sort of “fixer” for something like government are sycophants and the same ones that completely ignore privatization fucking over government (and the taxpayer) wirh cost overruns and wealthy executives.
They saw an opportunity to make money and took it. All else be damned.
We clearly know the problem with the world of today. However, we can’t do shit about it because US democracy is an absolute sham.
Choice A: unbridled consumption
Choice B: unbridled consumption
How can you call a country with a two-party political system a democracy is the real question here? Yes, you have primary and the political agenda of the candidates differ to some extent but this isn’t really a democracy in my eyes.
For me democracy is to have a plurality of political parties, to form a government with other political parties and people to have a real choice and what you have in the US isn’t exactly that.
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This info graphic illustrates perfectly how First Past the Post would play out in a country like Sweden.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Both of these arguments faced substantial blows in a hearing Thursday held by the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, chaired by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
“In other words, these companies are spending more to enrich their own stockholders and CEOs than they are in finding new cures and new treatments,” he said.
PBMs work as shadowy middle managers between drugmakers, insurers, and pharmacies, setting drug formularies and consumer prices, and negotiating rebates and discounts behind the scenes.
Rather, the heart of the problem, according to a Senate report released earlier this week, is pharmaceutical greed, patent gaming that allows drug makers to stretch out monopolies, and powerful lobbying.
On Thursday, the Senate committee gathered the CEOs of three behemoth pharmaceutical companies to question them on the drug pricing practices: Robert Davis of Merck, Joaquin Duato of Johnson & Johnson, and Chris Boerner of Bristol Myers Squibb.
The analysis found that from 2004 to 2008, the median launch price of innovative prescription drugs sold by J&J, Merck, and Bristol Myers Squibb was over $14,000.
The original article contains 658 words, the summary contains 176 words. Saved 73%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
