It’s not a drug company. It’s a market-failure-tapping company. That’s where the money is: find a place where you can suck money out of some system that’s intended to serve the public good, do so until it collapses, pocket the difference, go on to the next good thing and suck it dry, and so on.
I think the word for this company is “mosquito.”
So basically if you got this disease and had no insurance you are required to start robbing banks to stay alive.
Good luck with that. There was a steady decline in FDA budgets for my entire 20 year career there. IMO, the purpose of the US FDA is to only make products appear safe, for the good of the industry. (If products are safe, it is more due to happenstance.) It is not there for the good of patients. Thus “you’re taking too long to approve products” is rewarded with smaller budgets and more rules in laws like the “FDA Modernization Act.” If the FDA were given more resources, they might actually start doing things that industry doesn’t want, like approve cheap generics more rapidly and disapprove products that are dangerous. But there is a problem with this approach. The scientists resist, and so even though they don’t have the resources, they manage to try to do a good job, and thus gum up the whole works. Which is rewarded by smaller budgets, more rules, and drug industry hacks to run things.
I’m trying to think of a word to describe this. . . seems I heard one recently. . . “shkrelic.”
If the presidential race keeps moving in the direction it’s moving, don’t expect real change any time soon.
What we need is comprehensive legislation that puts a stop to these shenanigans. What are you going to do? Refuse to buy life-sustaining drugs until drug companies grow a conscience? There are no market-based solutions to this.
Suprise! Markets exist to exploit problems rather than to solve them. This is also true of many governments, which is why they get on so well together.
The CEO isn’t stepping down just because of the accounting issue. It’s a complex confluence of immorality and corporate horse shittery. This is a company that 1) has shady accounting (it’s not quite Enron but it’s Enron esque in that their numbers are more of less cooked to make the company look quite profitable when it operates at a loss) 2) jacks up the prices of drugs (and has taken considerable flack over it from the political world and even other pharma companies… that’s how you know you’ve no shame) 3) is implicated in a very unusual and likely fraudulent arrangement with at least one specialty pharmacy that more or less pushed Valeant drugs only (which was almost, but technically not really, a subsidiary of Valeant and fits into the accounting issue); and 4) generally has an unsustainable business model (buy up other companies, take on loads of debt and risk, cut R&D spending and jobs from those acquired companies, jack up drug prices, hope no one bothers to do anything about it, and hope it all works out).
They make Amgen look like Amnesty International.
Since the ACA prevents negotiating drug prices (that part of the bill no-doubt written by Big Pharma), we the tax payers will, by law, be forced to pay the increases. It seems Big Pharma is cashing in on the politicians they invested in. Sorry to be so cynical but health care costs have gone up at a faster rate since health care became “affordable”.
It’s not like the ACA was written to be successful. The republicans did shut down the government in order to force their hobbling crap into it.
You know we’d actually be better off if the original proposal for the ACA was put up by a rebublican, because then the conservative establishment wouldn’t have tried to sabotage it so badly.
Seriously, it ain’t Obama’s fault the ACA is a disappointment. It’s the fault of the ones who literally said their entire platform is to try and hinder Obama from being a good president. The ones who would deny the sky is blue if Obama pointed it out.
I’m disappointed with Obama for other reasons. But the ACA’s crappiness wasn’t his doing.
I did a short web search for cheap european alternatives, but the drug “Atamir” is discontinued in Denmark. Maybe it is available in Iceland. If anyone can find it, we should undermine the fraud and ship batches to the U.S. The company has tried to find a vital, but low-volume drug to prey on, so our task should be manageable.
It’s £8.40 ($12) for a month’s prescription in the UK (or free, if you’re on benefits).
One of the reasons why the NHS is the closest thing we have to religion in the UK.
I’m just glad that America’s sensible approach to pharmaceutical pricing is set to be exported worldwide with the TPP and all its many children
/s
Fuck this guy and his company, but mostly fuck the managers of the system who have created the greed thunderdome.
instead of managing the markets for the benefit of the people, the Free Marketeers (worst children’s story ever) do the opposite.
Why? Because they owe their allegiance to the drug money (and oil money, and gun money, and money money, etc) rather than the citizenry.
Bernie can’t happen soon enough!
We also need a series of Bernies coming down the line to run states and municipalities.
What a shame that politics is so repugnant - no decent people can stand it 
"It’s not like the ACA was written to be successful. The republicans did shut down the government in order to force their hobbling crap into it."
If your statement is true, then why did the Democrats pass the bill into law? They had a super-majority in congress and the executive but they ‘allowed’ Repubs to write parts of it and Big Pharma and the insurance companies to write large portions of it? You write as if the Repubs were the only ones representing special interests. The ACA was trying to reinvent the wheel which the French had perfected already. They should have adopted the French system and not caved to Repub extortion. The whole bill was kept secret e.g. Nancy Pelosi, “We Have to Pass the Bill So That You Can Find Out What Is In It”. We are now finding out that it does not decrease costs to individuals but rather, increases them dramatically and with much larger deductions. I’ve been for universal health care since high school and the ACA is just a mess whose flaws can’t ALL be placed at the feet of the Repubs. Special interests have taken over both the RNC and the DNC.
Had they not been in such a rush, the program should have begun with the expansion of medical schools to have enough doctors to cope with all the newly insured. Hospitals should have been given time and tax breaks to expand their facilities. The insurance companies should have been given chance to invest in the running of the collection/payment system. The poorest of the poor should have been brought into the program first and, as the system built up, the next level of income could be incorporated. Right now it is a big burden to buy insurance and those who are being subsidized are not being vetted properly leading to fraud and abuse. That the administration was not ready when the doors of the program
opened is clear now.
the Greed Beast is more important than any human being. It’s the law and it’s the system in place. Hell, we’re even bringing it to the rest of the world even when they don’t want it. And if their system says no, we do regime change on them.
Who is in charge? The Greed Beast, who is more important than any human being.
But think of the Breaking Bad type of opportunities.
It was: Mitt Romney introduced it in Massachusetts first. That still wasn’t good enough.
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