Big Pharma corporations are killing and bankrupting Americans for profit. They charge us outrageous prices for life-saving and sustaining medications, far more than in other wealthy countries. Even worse? These medications were developed with our public taxpayer dollars! That was one opening in a recent story online about the pharma industry. While information like this tends to be extreme, people think what THEY want to think.
Category Archive: Bad Pharma
According to Fierce Pharma, “Merck & Co. has dodged billions of dollars in U.S. taxes by offshoring profits on Keytruda, according to an ongoing investigation by Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee.” But what about Merck employees who recognize that this is wrong? What are they willing to do?
Chutzpah. It’s the only way to describe Merck’s plan to sue the government over the plan to negotiate drug prices, saying it is unconstitutional. Merck said in the lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., that Medicare’s drug-price negotiation program violated the company’s First and Fifth Amendment rights. This is a prime example of what’s wrong with pharma.
Horizon’s CEO, Tim Walbert, will reportedly get around $135 million when the company is sold to Amgen. He has mastered a particular kind of industry expertise: taking drugs invented and tested by other people, wrapping them expertly in hard-nosed marketing and warm-hued patient relations, raising their prices, and enjoying astounding revenues without spending one dime on drug development.
Chutzpah is defined as “extreme self-confidence or audacity.” In AbbVie’s case, it’s audacity. AbbVie, for years, delayed competition for its blockbuster drug Humira at the expense of patients and taxpayers.
Patient advocates on Tuesday blasted the Biden administration’s refusal to compel the manufacturer of a lifesaving prostate cancer drug developed entirely with public funds to lower its nearly $190,000 annual price tag. The drug’s development was 100% taxpayer-funded. Yet a one-year supply of Xtandi currently costs $189,800 in the United States.
President Biden successfully got insulin costs capped at $35 per month for Medicare recipients. But corporate sellout Democrats in the House and Kirsten Sinema in the Senate — along with every Republican — blocked his efforts to extend that to all Americans with diabetes. This is what happens when big pharma has no conscious.
“This is the golden age of drug discovery,” said Dr. Daniel Skovronsky, chief scientific and medical officer of Eli Lilly and Company. The burden on patients who cannot afford life-changing new drugs weighs heavily on him and others who work for drug companies. Really?