Music To The Ears Of The Big Pharmaceutical Companies

[tex]

(Reuters) - Children were the leading growth demographic for the pharmaceutical industry in 2009, with the increase of prescription drug use among youngsters nearly four times higher than in the overall population, according to a report by Medco Health Solutions Inc.

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE64I5N420100519

News such as this has to make Big Pharma grin from ear to ear. And now, with all the added provisions of the new "Health Care Reform Bill", kids will soon be legally poppin' pills at the same rate as adults. And this is just icing on the cake, compared to all the other benefits that the pharmaceutical companies will derive from the "health care reform". Big Pharma couldn't have done any better if they had won the lottery. They don't need the lottery - they've got health care reform, and guess who's providing the money.

"Pharma came out of this better than anyone else," said Ramsey Baghdadi, a Washington health policy analyst who projects a $30 billion, 10-year net gain for the industry. "I don't see how they could have done much better."

All one needs to do is to look at the pharmaceutical industry's political contributions to see what has been going on behind the scenes:

And after years of funneling most of its campaign contributions to Republicans, the industry has favored Democrats with 56 percent of the $5 million it has handed candidates so far this year. The biggest recipient, by far, of the industry's 2008 election cycle contributions of $13.8 million was Obama, who received $1.2 million for his presidential campaign.

"They're certainly going to get a very high return on that investment," Waxman said in a recent interview.

The red emphasis is mine, of course. These last two quotes are from this article, published a couple of months ago, on March 29th:

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/03/29-8

Once again, the citizens of this country have been ripped off by it's government.

Note that I'm not trying to claim that we didn't need health care reform, because we did. I'm just saying that the citizens of this country didn't need to make the pharmaceutical industry rich(er), in the process. So now we need health care reform even more desperately than we did to begin with, because now we are even less likely to be able to afford it.

Tex

[Stanz]

What would you like to have seen happen in the US with healthcare reform, as surely what we have isn't working and needed to be changed?

[tex]

Connie,

I would have preferred that congress address the main problem - namely, the already unaffordable, and yet rapidly escalating cost of health care. The cost of medical care is totally unrealistic - it's a prime example of runaway inflation, (it continues to increase, while the rest of the world is experiencing a period of major recession/deflation).

The government's solution was simply to make it more expensive than it already is, by padding the pockets of Big Pharma, and the insurance companies, (the same two entities who were already getting rich at our expense). In the process, I'm sure that they allowed plenty of provisions for siphoning off additional tax money, in order to keep keep big government growing. That's not a solution, IMO. That's not a reform, either - it's a "deform".

Tex

[Gabes-Apg]

i dont think i need to repeat my previous rants about this topic!