The CEO of the world’s largest biotechnology trade group said at a panel discussion at the Democratic National Convention on Wednesday that Americans need to take more drugs “instead of going to the hospital.”
Jim Greenwood is the head of the Biotechnology Industry Organization, which represents companies involved with such things as genetically engineered crops and prescription drugs.
Speaking at an event put on by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation — a think tank funded by Google, IBM, Cisco, eBay, and other corporate underwriters — Greenwood argued that high prescription-drug prices are a boon to the economy and public health.
The U.S. already has the highest prices for drugs in the industrialized world, but Greenwood argued that prescription drugs, regardless of their price, lower overall health care costs.
“I hear that drugs are 15 percent of all health care spending,” Greenwood said. “I’d like it to be 100 percent. That would mean you could take a drug when you’re sick instead of going to the hospital.”
Greenwood is a former member of the House. The roundtable discussion also featured Sen. Chris Coons and Reps. Derek Kilmer, Suzanne DelBene, and Scott Peters.
None of them — or anyone else on the panel, which included executives from Facebook and Amazon — challenged the idea that prescription drugs could be used as a treatment for everything that currently requires hospitalization – such as gunshot wounds or being struck by a car.
Later in the discussion, Greenwood offered a “note of caution” to Congress. “When you have a system that’s working really well, be careful of throwing a wrench into one part of it.” The “wrench,” in this case, would be making drug prices cheaper—and, presumably, continuing to fund hospitals.
The Democratic Party’s official platform, adopted on Monday, calls for capping out-of-pocket costs on prescription drugs, allowing importation of prescription drugs from lower-cost countries like Canada, and letting Medicare negotiate lower prices with drug companies, which it is currently prohibited from doing.
“It is unacceptable that the United States pays, by far, the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs,” the platform reads. “A lifesaving drug is no good if it is unaffordable to the very people who need it most.”
Greenwood said that high prices were the only way to acquire the funds for research and development that drives innovations in medications that can fight illness. But as the platform says, “many drug companies are spending more on advertising than research,” and the profit margins for the drug industry are higher than other industries.
As soon as they start pumping out meds that do work and not just kill you at a faster rate, then I’m game with their agenda. Otherwise, they can keep dreaming about their long range plans to keep us out of hospitals.
The success to Big Pharma is suppression of natural medicines. They can lobby and pay Gov’t officials to ban certain natural medicines. William Randolph Hearst in the early 1900’s had a lot of timber land in North Carolina and he used the trees from his land to cut down and print newspapers. During this time he a newspaper tycoon and married the President of the US sister. At this time the decorticator had just been invented, which effectively cultivated hemp (which our Declaration of Independence was printed on). To transfer his printing press over to hemp would have cost millions of dollars even though it was a superior product. Because of this Hearst started printing propaganda in his newspapers and magazines that black people and mexicans were smoking marijuana and raping white women.
Read above and learn some history folks. Big Pharma is bad and they kill 6x more people a year than guns just with pain pills.
I’m all for hemp legalization, and I believe it has a lot of potential. But hemp hurds – the stuff Herer proposed for using paper – still aren’t actually being used for making paper as far as I know, e.g. this site doesn’t mention paper as an application: http://nationalhempassociation.org/hemp-hurds-the-inside-story/
Herer told a great story, one with resonance in the face of far worse guesswork on behalf of prohibitionists; nonetheless, hemp hurd paper was never a real product, just a promising line of research. Thanks to prohibition, it is still in pretty much the same position now. But technology has to actually be developed before somebody can print a newspaper on it, so Hearst seems more like a convenient villain than a convincing one.
Much the same is true of big pharma. It’s easy to say, like Aesop’s fox, the grapes were sour anyway. But the truth is, there are many highly useful drugs, even if most carry some hidden sting that tells us to be cautious. Denigrating the science can sometimes be a very useful, if desperate, tactic — I remember when the capitalists had used patents to lock up the anti-HIV drugs and Nelson Mandela sponsored a conference featuring Duesberg, a man most charitably categorized as an idiot. But the message seemed pretty loud and clear to me: you deny our people the right to make pills to prevent AIDS death, we’ll provide a platform for people like this to spread lies and kill some idiots back in your own country. Very soon afterward, there was much hullabaloo about a “charitable” program to help the Third World. (The way I see it, when the first reports of HIV already featured an iconic image of a box of nucleoside analogs that included AZT, giving market exclusivity to the first person to file with that result is not really valid property, and giving back a crumb from the theft of people’s right to make medicine is not really charity)
Even so, without a compelling strategy I’m not sure I want to jump on such a cause here. Hating Big Pharma makes sense, but misleading people to harm them as a tactic is something to be weighed very carefully.
Paying for cutting-edge pharmaceutical research is a good social priority. The problem is, high drug prices don’t pay for pharmaceutical research. They pay for marketers, bean-counters, and connivers, with just a little bit left over to do formalized clinical trials after most of the breakthrough work has been done at major universities on federal tax dollars. We need to extend that public pipeline all the way to the marketplace, and eradicate the very concept of taxing the sick to pay for research, let alone anything more sordid. I’m not saying we can’t have private research in addition to an expanded system of public grants, but it should be of the type where a bounty is offered for people who figure out, say, a new antibiotic that works on some reference organisms in a petri dish, and a bigger bounty for people who go through the public list of candidates from the first step and figure out which ones are not lethal to a mouse, and so forth.
Time to drive the moneychangers out of the hospital. Jesus would bring a whip, and I’m not more charitably inclined.
I agree, this is an excellent innovation, obviously needs to be improved. Healthcare plans are too expensive. Hospitals should be used as few as we can or in extreme cases.
“Americans need to take more drugs “instead of going to the hospital.”
A big shout-out to CEO, Jim Greenwald, for supporting the legalization of cannabis!
Stand up and take a toke, Jimmy!
I read somewhere that marijuana reduces the demand for opioids and reduces medical costs.
I wonder what Trumps view on medical marijuana is?
why don’t you ask him, fanboy? maybe he will autograph one of your tits.
I am still trying to absorb the unintentional irony of a former Republican congressman at a DNC event.
Though I am not at all surprised.
Maybe not so unintentional. Since the GOP now has someone for a candidate who does far more than dog whistle their (and certainly, his own) usual bigotry, and since Hillary isn’t exactly confronting their wrong-wing policies head-on, more than a few have decided they’re With Her® for better or worse.
So. The disconnect of the ‘liberal party of America’ in allowing this message at DNC sanctioned events, and yet disallowing Nina Turner speaking at their/her own convention once Hillary was anointed tells us all what?
Complete Bozos!
Here is an example of the pharma industry and their cronies of the FDA in action.
According to http://www.fda.gov/NewsEvents/Newsroom/PressAnnouncements/ucm436534.htm
the Bristol-Myers Squibb drug Opdivo was approved for use last year based on a clinical trial with only 272 participants, of whom about half received Opdivo for their squamous non-small cell carcinoma of the lung, and the rest received an alternative chemotherapy. On the average, the Opdivo patients lived an additional 3.2 months.
Based on that, BMS has launched a TV ad campaign urging people with squamous NSC lung cancer to get their physicians to prescribe Opdivo, because of its promise of lengthening their lives. If you see the ad you need to have exquisite timing and excellent vision to see where in the small print the 3.2 month figure is mentioned. But hey, 3.2 months is 3.2 months, right?
The question is, how can BMS afford to advertise a drug that only lengthens life by 3.2 months? After all, it’s not like a statin that someone could be on for decades.
Here is how:
According to the manufacturer, http://packageinserts.bms.com/pi/pi_opdivo.pdf the dosage is 3 mg per kg weight, every two weeks. So if your typical patient has already wasted away to 50 kg (110 lb) they would require 150 mg per dose, or 300 mg every two weeks. Keep that in mind, and go to
http://www.goodrx.com/opdivo
where you will see that 100 mg of Opdivo is priced at around $15,000. So, 300 mg every 2 weeks = $45000 every two weeks, $90,000 per month, $270,000 for a three month course of treatment. That is correct: TWO HUNDRED SEVENTY THOUSAND DOLLARS for three months.
Now do you understand how they can afford the TV ads?
I wonder: Do they sell Opdivo in the EU, where the TV ads are prohibited? Can you see a doctor recommending that their terminally ill patient spend more than a quarter million dollars on the promise of living only 3.2 months longer?
That’s why we should vote for Dr. Jill Stein.
Democrats are as bad as Republicans.
Agree about TV advertising of drugs. It should be regulated IMO as the expenses thrown at marketing these drugs are too high.
As you point out the price of Opdivo is outrageously high and studies support that conclusion (http://www.jto.org/article/S1556-0864(16)30507-X/pdf).
However, to be accurate about this you should acknowledge that the alternative drug, which the control group received, is Docetaxel is itself expensive, and based on the Swiss study above is 57% the price of Opdivo. By your numbers that would be about $154,000 per 3 months.
My other point would is that the FDA job is too verify efficacy versus available treatments. It is then the company, the market, and insurance companies fix the price and accessibility of the medicine. From the looks of the study above they will like have to reduce the price on this med, and the insurance companies will likely reduce coverage benefits on it.
Here is an example of the pharma industry at work: the new lung cancer drug Opdivo, which was approved by the FDA based on a clinical trial with all of 272 participants: http://www.fda.gov/NewsEvents/Newsroom/PressAnnouncements/ucm436534.htm . Opdivo resulted in a 3.2 month greater lifetime than the alternative treatment, leading its maker, Brisol-Myers Squibb to begin a national TV ad campaign promising longer life to people with squamus non-small cell carcinoma. How can they afford to do that? Well, according to a number of providers http://www.goodrx.com/opdivo six vials of the drug cost around $15,000. Those 6 vials provide 4 doses for a person weighing 50 kg per http://packageinserts.bms.com/pi/pi_opdivo.pdf so would last 4 weeks. Thus the cost of prolonging your life by an average of 3.2 months would be around $45,000 for the Opdivo alone. Any questions about the motivation here?
Please ignore the above post; I made a math error. As indicated in the corrected post above it, it’s 6 times worse.
Again, apologies.
“high drug prices are good for the economy”
I have also heard, high oil prices are good, high car prices are good, high real estate prices are good, and high grocery prices are good.
High sentencing years would be good, too!
Don’t you worry, change is coming. All these years the drug manufacturers have been paying candidates to get elected, and they return the favor later and keep the prices high. It is a fact that almost all drugs go through the costly development and testing phase with public funds, and once the efficacy is suspected from the trials that it is patented for exclusive profits. So while really not spending much on development, the drug manufacturers claim they need high price to fund their R&D. Our elected representatives vigorously nod in faithful agreement.
But change is coming. Jobs are coming back. The walls are going up and the price of drugs are coming down very fast. These fellows are very worried that Trump is not taking a penny from them, so they are spreading all these false unscientific and baseless theories to shore up their profits. Lyin’ Ted has basically spread his disease to his sponsors as well, it seems to me.
Academia, which should be publically funded, is indeed a benefit to all of us, including corporations of all strips. Additionally, the government, through the FDA, requires testing for public safety. So both those are expenses you can rationalize that pharmaceutical companies gain from public funding although they may not want the later. It is crazy nuts to think that drug development is easy and does not deserve a profit given less than a 10% success rate on the endeavor. So easy to bitch and moan when others carry you water.
Well, they do need a lot of money to sponsor all the elections. They also hold a lot of conferences to encourage doctors to prescribe their medicines.
You forgot to mention the voluntary computing that many people the world over participate in for the development of drugs.
The community that participates in the development of the drugs is seen as the meat for the predatory companies.
But all this is going to stop. We will change the law that allows these companies to corrupt our politicians. We will bring in great Judges who will see through this nonsense and repeal the verdict that allowed these predators to flourish. And yes, with no need to fund elections those folks can supply us the drugs at a much lower price and still make a profit.
Chip development and space flights are are infinitely more complicated than drug development, but we are nowhere near being ripped off for them. That’s because they cannot prey on society by playing up life and death situations.
If you cast your vote correctly we can change all that very soon.
When you tally up the costs incurred by the pharmaceutical industry, be sure to include advertising, marketing and lobbying costs. In fact they spend more in the US on TV ads than they do on R&D. So if you are so concerned about their profitability, why not demand that they not be allowed to advertise prescription drugs in the US, and that the tax code be rewritten to disallow lobbying expenses and all the perqs and junkets they pay for getting physicians to prescribe their products?
Jeff, Agree 100% on with you regarding advertising, marketing and lobbying costs!
Hercules, removing lobbyists and corporate financing of elections, is the number 1 fix this country needs. Number 2 is adopting proportional tally type of vote counting to prevent the lesser of 2 evil model. However, to conclude either of those will happen is naive, as politicians are corporate servants and the people are propagandized thoroughly. I am behind you 100%, but believe neither will ever happen!
Regarding chip development and space flights being “infinitely more complicated than drug development”, that notion is absurd. Only in the sense of screening random compound libraries does that statement make a tiny bit of sense. Drug development has become and will become more based on a complete understanding of the human body. Its biochemistry, its structure, its genetic regulation, understanding the nature of the human mind, and the design of drugs that treat malfunctions of all these are the thing infinitely more complex than mere Moore’ Law Chip design or Space Travel.
Spoken like a company man, glider. Glad you enjoy being ripped off. Lobby your local goverment officals to raise more taxes that pay for more corporate activities and subsidies. In fact, if you think it is sooooo good, best give ALL your money to them. Or quit your bitching.
Staller, please explain, not getting your cryptic response. I never promoted subsidies for corporations, and believe the FDA should be a publically funded oversight agency. Do you want to get rid of the EPA to? Or have it run by corporate money? There are enough problems with the revolving door between government and corporations. Tossing in privatized oversight agencies would exacerbate that trouble.
If your are referring to my comment that academia should be publically funded. By that I mean our declining education system which is the backbone of America should not be turned into privatized system for the children of the Oligarchy, and everyone should have access to it based on merit.
America the land of product exploitation from central airconditioning that requires hours or labor and ductwork whereas in other parts of the world,Hitachi and others make and sell units that require just simple hookups. If one goes to the doctor in America ,one will walk out with at least one scripts if not more and probably for life. Tell the doctor that you are sad and there are meds such as Prozac. America is a country of medicated citizens ,medicated via the doctor or via street drugs
In other news, paying prostitutes more will result in better sex and more stable marriages.
Why do you demean prostitutes? Do they not deserve respect? It is really one of the most exploited set of people who can do with some understanding from us.
Forgive them, they are Christians, they know not what they do.
Mixed truth I suppose. Much of what doctors do is prescribe medications based on pharmaceutical research data. Enormous unnecessary expenses are baked into our medical system that could be relieved by granting licensed Pharmacists reasonable prescriptive authority. Instead you go back to your physician every 3 months for 10 years to get your blood pressure or whatever meds. It does not take a genius to see why America has the least cost efficient medical system in the world. To bad educated politicians use their power to dis-empower their people.
Sure, let pharmacists take care of everything and (magically) it would turn out that everything really does have a pharmaceutical solution.
We just need to find the right pill, you see. Oh, and something for the side effect the first pill produced.
Nobody is forcing you to take FDA approved meds, nor should you force anyone not to have that option!
How do you handle infections if you do not believe in drugs? I would be dead otherwise. Not a problem for you?
Would it be a problem for me, if you were dead? Ask again later.
LOL! thanks for the sentiment. Glad to know you have never benefited from antibiotics even. Must have good genes!
I’m almost inclined to keep replying, just to see how many conclusions you can jump to.
We have the most expensive health care system in the world, and the lowest male and female life expectancies and highest infantile mortality rate among all the developed countries. The pharmaceutical industry richly deserves some but not all of the blame for that. Their part includes placing physicians in inherent conflict of interest situations by paying them to prescribe their products in lieu of generics or alternative treatment strategies, in successfully lobbying for more expansive monopolies through patent extensions, and in manipulating the patent system to get patent protection for trivial modifications to existing products. I don’t see how empowering pharmacists to issue prescriptions would remedy any of these problems.
We need a public health care system to fix the problem.
Agree with all you say except the dismissal of removing very highly paid physicians (deliberately controlled to be a small powerful force) from having an absolute monopoly on prescriptive authority. Visits to doctors for the slightest of needs is much more expensive then a trip to the pharmacy. Not to mention the problem of delays in getting a doctor’s appointment.
Jeff, to state the obvious, the bad statistics you site have to do with having a very expensive private health care system. Poor people are thrown under the bus. If you do not have insurance the system is rigged by a collaboration between providers and insurance companies to jack up your rates astronomically. All that is to scare you into buying their bad product or face bankruptcy. If you were to examine the same statistics you mention for the top one percenters in America it would show they have the best medical outcomes in the world.
Thank you for highlighting the preposterous words of this imbecile.
Drugs should be 100% of health care costs, eh? What pill will people take after a car wreck that makes it all better? Even on Star Trek they have doctors…
It infuriates me when these millionaire jackasses are treated deferentially even when the stupidest things come out of their mouths.
I think he is using a bit of exaggeration to make a point.
In the future, as has occurred for well over 100 years now, more medicines will come available that will cure more problems. There is a limit to what your doctor can do with a knife now, or with leeches in the past. Doctor’s use tools and research provided to them by academia and corporations. While it will never be 100% it could be much higher than it is now, for a given age group. But hey we will all die and meds will only delay physician intervention to another time.
No, he is expressing wishful thinking. An intelligent and balanced discussion of the future of health care would necessarily involve nutrition and preventive measures such as routine physical examinations. But the pharmaceutical industry does not make any money on those things, and neither do the high tech firms like IBM that sponsored this nonsense. Sometimes the solution does not involve high tech intervention, but rather prevention.
There are tremendous benefits to the use of medical hypnosis, but, as it requires no medications, the public’s awareness of it remains very limited.
He is involved in the business and would not want him to have any other vision. But yes, the American system from top to bottom focuses on fixing problems, and gives scant attention to prevention. Much of that is of our own doing. Most go to establishment doctors when they have a problem and ask for a solution. There is some discussion of prevention in physicals and lifestyle comments. But we are free to seek other solutions outside of the establishment system, hence we have thinks like herbalists and vegan products. I can only imagine the screaming that would occur by some of my attackers here if the FDA decided to regulate these providers.
Agree with you 100%. I spend a lot of time in Germany, and in that otherwise admirable and logic-driven country there is a tremendous business in homeopathic medicines and other such nonsense. So the US is by no means alone in the underregulation of medications.
I would like to see the FDA’s charter expanded, provided the agency was first cleansed of its pharma-industry-revolving-dooreres (see, I really do spend a lot of time in Germany ;-) ) The people who sit on the boards approving treatments, whether they be prescription drugs or otherwise, need to be free of conflicts of interest and possessing rigorous scientific training.
Just to be clear I am not in favor to the FDA regulating natural products or expanding their charter. Most of the regulation of synthesized drugs is within reason. I do not like the idea of a Nanny-State. People should be free to pursue their vision within reasonable constaints. But as you focus here, if I was to pick a particularly insane choice I think Homeopathy would be at the very top of that quack list. Lots of gullible people but we always have Darwin.
Heart attack? Take two aspirin and call us in the morning. It’s like a Terry Gilliam movie.
Drugs that reduce plaque build up in your arteries help in addition to the aspirin. But if you prefer you can just wait for the heart attack and have a doctor cut open your chest for some more crude solution. I personally do not like the idea of my chest being splayed open. Good luck with that vision.