The U.S. pharmaceutical market, the world's biggest, rose 3.8 percent to $286.5 billion in 2007…
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601202&sid=aVqx3x2Y_Mmo&refer=healthcareThat is a lot of money. It is almost a bank bailout every year. Of course, we know where this money is going. It is being recycled right back into the U.S. economy, unlike the cash that the banks refuse to loan. That is good for America, right? Even if our drugs are overpriced, and our pharmaceutical industry is waging a quiet war against healthcare reform, at least we can say that the dollars we spend on expensive designer copycat drugs like Nexium help pay for our roads and schools. And the companies that make them have a personal interest in seeing Americans and their communities prosper, because they are our neighbors….
There is just one problem with this rosy picture. It is not true. Did you know that six out of the world’s top ten pharmaceutical companies are European owned? And even though they are headquartered in countries that boast of having the best healthcare systems in the world, these companies have no qualms about ripping off the American healthcare consumer. And interfering in our political process. Because, hey, money makes the world go round, and there is a lot of cash to be made from the wasteful, inefficient,
expensive U.S. way of doing medicine.
Even corporate bosses sometimes have qualms about hurting people whom they consider their own kind, aka "shitting in your own yard". It is much easier to run a scam in another country. If the people who are tricked, defrauded, poisoned live someplace far away and if you can convince yourself that they are not nice people at all, then any profit you reap from their misfortune comes without guilty strings attached. Monsanto plays this game across the globe with its so called designer seeds (as if a company can patent nature). U.S. gun manufacturers ship tragedy and death to as many foreign lands as possible. And the big pharmaceutical companies of Europe have a vested interest in seeing nothing change about the U.S. healthcare system, which spends twice as much as any western European system per person (much of that on drugs) to achieve results which are much worse.
Here is a list of the top European drug companies. Note that their ranking is based upon worldwide sales. These folks do not get rich peddling drugs to the National Health.
GlaxoSmithKline based in the United Kingdom, with total revenue of $45 billion, is the world’s third largest pharmaceutical company. According to Sourcewatch, GSK was fined by the U.S. government for overcharging Medicaid for Flonase and Paxil. They have also gotten into trouble for marketing the anti-depressant for children, even though it has not been safety tested on this population. The IRS has sued them several times to collect over $10 billion in taxes owed to the U.S. government for domestic sales. They make Avandia. Be sure to read about how they hired front groups to attack the researcher who discovered the link between the diabetes drug and heart problems.
In terms of lobbying, they gave almost a million dollars to U.S. federal candidates in 2006—the year that Medicare Part D aka the Drug Company Giveaway was put into effect. Most of that money went to Republicans. They also hire U.S. lobbyists to push their interests here and have even engaged in public relations work to improve their image in the U.S.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=GlaxoSmithKlineAccording to the Guardian U.K. story, we the people of the United States are GSK’s biggest market.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/jul/22/glaxosmithkline-sales-us-patents Bayer from Germany, is essentially tied with GSK. Since Bayer is a German company that was part of I G Farben during WWII, they were supporters of Nazi Germany and produced, among other things, the gas used at Auschwitz. Makes you wonder about that cross on their logo.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BayerIn 2006, Bayer was caught misleading the FDA about the safety of Trasylol, a drug used to control bleeding during heart surgery.
The study confirmed an earlier trial showing that the Leverkusen, Germany-based company's drug increased the risk of kidney failure, heart attacks and strokes.
The FDA learned the truth from a researcher, after the German Company “forgot” to mention the problem. As a result, the FDA launched an investigation, which a German banker called “heavy handed” as he predicted decreased profits for the company.
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=14185Though Bayer only gave away a quarter of million to federal candidates in 2006 (mostly to Republicans), they spent over $3 million that same year on U.S. lobbying.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=BayerBayer is also noteworthy for being the creator of the statin that kills you, Baycol. One of the dirty little secrets of the pharmaceutical industry is that they do not invest money looking for new ways to treat disease. Instead, they invest money in altering the chemical formula of their competitor’s best seller---in this case Mevacor, which was a direct rip off of the ancient Chinese herbal red rice yeast---so that they can patent a “new” drug. Sometimes the new product is better, sometimes it is the same, and in the case of Baycol, it was worse. However, the point is not to make a
better drug, it is to create a new patent and gain a spot in the top ten drugs prescribed in the United States.
Hoffmann–La Roche of Switzerland is fifth with a hefty $40 billion in revenues. The company made the record books with its half a billion dollar fine in the U.S. for illegal price fixing for vitamins. They bought Donald Rumsfeld’s Gilead Sciences along with Tamiflu, a patent which they guarded jealously, even as bird flu swept across Asia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoffmann%E2%80%93La_RocheSanofi-Aventis of France also makes about $40 billion a year. They spent $5 million of that lobbying in the U.S. in 2006. Their claim to infamy was Ketek, an antibiotic associated with liver failure and death in children.
Initially, Sanofi-Aventis defended the antibiotic as safe when used as directed. <1> However, after a flurry of negative reports, the company announced on June 8, 2006, that it was voluntarily ceasing the Ketek trials involving children. The FDA also ceased recruitment for the study.
The criticism before Sanofi-Aventis' reversal was scathing. "How does one justify balancing the risk of fatal liver failure against one day less of ear pain?" asks Dr. Rosemary Johann-Liang, of the FDA's Office of Drug Safety, in a memo uncovered by the New York Times. <2> Duke University infectious disease specialist Dr. Danny Benjamin called the pediatric trial "hard to support." Benjamin also noted that antibiotics are less frequently recommended for pediatric treatment of routine ear infections.
In 2009, the company was fined almost $100 million for “scamming the poor” in the United States, by inflating the costs of drugs sold via Medicaid.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Sanofi-AventisWhich proves my point. When you do business across the ocean, it is easy to compromise your morals. So what if some poor people found their healthcare funding source, Medicaid, depleted because of drug company greed? The poor folks in question are just foreigners.
Novartis of Switzerland comes in at number seven out of the top ten, again with sales of almost $40 billion. The company has sought to challenge a law in India, which
Disallows frivolous patents for "the mere discovery of a new form of a known substance which does not result in the enhancement of the known efficacy of that substance".
At stake are thousands of dollars per dose of vital chemotherapy, money that Novartis wants to squeeze from the citizens of India.
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=14631You can read more about Novartis’ plans for financial success in the lucrative U.S. market in the Bloomberg link at the top.
AstraZeneca of Sweden and the UK comes in at number eight with $30 billion in revenues. Like some of the companies above, AstraZeneca likes to take old drugs that are ready to lose their patent and stick a new name (and patent on them).
The company's most successful medication is Omeprazole. When it is manufactured the result is a mixture of two mirror-imaged molecules, R and S. Both are converted to the same active molecule in the body. Two years before the omeprazole patent expired Astra Zeneca patented S-omeprazole in pure form, pointing that since some people metabolise R-omeprazole slowly, pure S-omeprazole treatment would give higher dose efficiency and less interindividual variation. <28> The company marketed Nexium, as it would a brand new drug. This practice is criticised because it maintains the profits of drug companies at the expense of patients and public healthcare systems.<29>
On 16th of August, 2007, Marcia Angell, former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine and Harvard Medical School lecturer in social medicine, alleged in the German magazine "Stern" that AstraZeneca's scientists had doctored their research on the drug's efficiency:
Instead of using presumably comparable doses , the company's scientists used Nexium in higher dosages. They compared 20 and 40mg Nexium with 20mg Prilosec. With the cards having been marked in that way, Nexium looked like an improvement- which however was only small and shown in only two of the three studies.
Did you know that Nexium is the second most profitable drug sold in the U.S. after the cholesterol lowering agent, Lipitor? We spent almost $6 billion in 2008 for a drug that is essentially the same as Prilosec.
http://www.prlog.org/10238024-lipitor-nexium-still-topselling-brands.htmlA 28 day supply of Prilosec 20 mg will set you back about $20. That is less than a dollar a pill. According to this author's calculation, someone on Medicare D who takes Nexium 40 mg a day will save almost $600 a year taking 2 Prilosecs a day OTC.
http://onthepharm.net/2007/12/how-much-does-nexium-cost.htmlAs a side note, be sure to check out the top sellers in the link above. The only strictly "American" drug is Lipitor, from Pfizar. As I mentioned above, Lipitor and the other statins are copies of the much cheaper (and possibly safer) Chinese herbal red rice yeast, which has been used for centuries in the east. The next four drugs are all brought to you by foreign companies. Plavix is actually from sanofi-aventis. There has been a huge push within the medical community, almost certainly fueled by the makers of Plavix, to discredit aspirin for the prevention of heart attack in men and stroke in women. Doctors are being inundated by research that shows that aspirin is dangerous and ineffective. Meanwhile, the much more expensive and less effective Plavix has booming sales. Advair-Diskus from GSK is actually a pretty nifty drug and probably deserves a spot on the most popular list, because it is easy to use and increases compliance. However, the same medications can be obtained more cheaply in other forms. The final drug in the top five, the atypical antipsychotic Seroquel, from AstraZenaca is also the subject on an intense marketing campaign, with its company pushing it for everything from depression to anxiety disorder. The problem? There are plenty of other, safer, cheaper ways to treat anxiety and depression, methods that do not carry the risk of massive weight gain which can lead to diabetes. Maybe antipsychotics should be reserved for the folks who really need them, the schizophrenics, whose risk-benefit ratio is a little better. However, there are a whole lot more depressed and anxious people in the U.S. than their are schizophrenics. Note that a favorite drug company ploy to increase sales is to get FDA approval for one use and then tell doctors (and patients) to use it for something else.
Once again, most of the money donated to U.S. federal candidates by AstraZeneca went to Republicans in 2006. The company also spent almost $3 million on U.S. lobbying.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=AstraZenecaAstra-Zeneca was recently found guilty (along with two other companies) of fixing the prices of its Medicare drugs.
http://www.naturalnews.com/022835.htmlNote that while the United States spends almost twice as much per person per year on health care, only four of the top ten pharmaceutical manufacturers are U.S. companies. That means that a lot of folks in Europe make a lot of money from our broken, bloated, ineffective health care system. Also note that drug manufacturers got a good return on their investment to Republican politicians who reined in efforts to control spending under Medicare D by allowing the federal government to negotiate prices. Congressional Republicans filibustered the bill in 2007.
http://bobgeiger.blogspot.com/2007/04/democrats-respond-to-gop-filibuster-of.htmlIf Medicare D has been a gift to the pharmaceutical companies, healthcare reform, especially the public option is their worst nightmare. European drug manufacturers in particular have good reason to know that once a single, large entity starts paying the bills in this country, inevitably it will begin to bargain for the best and cheapest drugs. In Europe, drug companies have to court public officials to get their drugs on formulary. In the U.S., they can market directly to doctors and---especially---the public.
I'ved poked around Washington today, talking with friends on the Hill who confirm the worst: Big Pharma and Big Insurance are gaining ground in their campaign to kill the public option in the emerging health care bill.
You know why, of course. They don't want a public option that would compete with private insurers and use its bargaining power to negotiate better rates with drug companies. They argue that would be unfair. Unfair? Unfair to give more people better health care at lower cost? To Pharma and Insurance, "unfair" is anything that undermines their profits.
http://robertreich.blogspot.com/2009/06/public-option-smokescreens-and-what-you.htmlNow, I have nothing against products that are made by foreign companies---if the products are safe, effective and reasonably priced. However, I do have a problem with companies based in countries which have decent, affordable, mostly universal (except for immigrants) health care coming to our country and trying to keep us from getting some decent healthcare, too. And I worry when I see them donating large sums of money to the Republicans in order to keep healthcare reform from happening.
I would like to think that the average citizens of Europe are in favor of good health for all and that they object to their corporation's fraudulent practices as well as their massive lobbying against U.S. health care reform. But then I run across articles like this one, a piece in the British press which calmly discusses how the election of John Kerry would be bad for the business of the pharmaceutical giant, AstraZeneca.
The board of AstraZeneca, the pharmaceutical giant, met in the US last week to examine the effect a John Kerry victory would have on its business. Their assessment comes amid concern that a Democrat president would usher in dramatically lower drug prices that would have to be countered by savage job cuts to shore up profits in the industry.
The pharmaceutical industry is where presidential politics can most directly impinge on corporate profits. Because there are no central price controls, the US is the most lucrative drug market in the world, accounting for half the industry's sales. But Big Pharma's giant profits and venal marketing behaviour are reported alongside tales of pensioners having to pay some of the highest drug prices in the world. The Democrats, never traditionally a friend to the industry, see plenty of political capital in an attack on Big Pharma.
AstraZeneca's analysis started by looking at the Bush and Kerry policies and ended up putting a guesstimate "earnings per share" cost on a Kerry triumph.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/big-pharma-fears-a-kerry-win-will-lead-to-curbs-on-drug-prices-547243.htmlFunny, I would have expected the oh so much more compassionate and civilized British press to criticize AstraZeneca for its political machinations in another country struggling to improve its healthcare system. However, the story is presented as a business piece. Heathcare reform in the U.S--especially attempts to control run away prices charged to Medicare patients--is treated a matter of dollars and cents. What would the same publication say if American business interests interfered in British elections, in order to improve their profit margin, at the expense of British citizens? I think we know.
And, what might the British press have to say about U.S. health care reform if it began to look like changes will be made that cut the profits of drug companies, several of which happen to be British? We do not have to guess. The Guardian has already had its say. Alongside articles about how unethical it is to deny healthcare to citizens, they have a piece about how
wrong it would be to do anything to rein in the use of expensive sometimes worthless and sometimes deadly pharmaceuticals.
Once upon a time there was a horse that was so productive working in the field that he put all the other horses to shame. The farmer who owned him was proud of the animal but, always looking for ways to cut costs, halved the horse's feed. Still, he was more productive than any other. This continued, with the farmer cutting the horse's rations until finally, the now emaciated horse dropped dead while pulling the plough. The farmer scratched his head and said: "I wonder what happened. I'll miss him, because he was a terrific worker."
It has become fashionable at the White House and on Capitol Hill to try to cut costs at the expense of the pharmaceutical industry, although this sector has been one of the nation's most innovative and successful: in other words, the standout workhorse.
President Obama seems determined to cut the horse's rations further, to eke out huge cost savings at drug companies' expense. "You've heard that as a consequence of our efforts at reform, the pharmaceutical industry has already said they're willing to put $80bn on the table," he said at a town hall last month. "We might be able to get $100bn out or more."
Starving this industry would be short-sighted.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/aug/21/healthcare-obama-pharmaceutical-industry Short sighted? Only if your eyes are fixed firmly on the accounting ledgers of Europe's big pharmaceutical companies.
Whenever there is a disconnect between what the people of a country envision for themselves and what their elected officials are offering them, it is a good idea to look to see if the forces of economic colonialism are at work. The people of the Congo live in a state of constant war because countries like Israel, the U.S. and France make money from their misery.
Are we, the people of the United States, forced to swallow poor quality, overpriced healthcare, because some folks far, far away are making money from it?
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