Posted on 11/18/2018 7:27:39 PM PST by Rabin
Daniel Best, a high-level Health and Human Services official, tasked with lowering drug prices was found dead and, according District of Columbia Metropolitan Police Department, took his own life. Best was a drug industry insider. “Azar and Best know where the bodies are buried”…
(Excerpt) Read more at theepochtimes.com ...
The mafia had a much higher code of ethics than some aspects of American Big business
Exactly. We are subsidizing the cost of drug R&D for most other countries in the world. If the other countries would pay the R&D costs, drug prices would increase for them and decrease for us.
Six self-inflicted gunshots to the back of the head.
how high is the apartment building? maybe he jumped?
Beat yourself to death with a stick?
Did he refuse an offer he was not supposed to refuse ?
ANOTHER PROGRESSIVE MYTH DEBUNKED: What the Prescription Drug Debate Gets Wrong. If we want new drugs for Alzheimer’s and the other ravages of old age, the last thing we need is European-style price controls at the pharmacy. But that’s the dream of Democrats, and the Trump administration is unfortunately threatening to go along with it.
This campaign is based on the same myth that was used to sell Obamacare: Americans are dying because their health-care system is an international disgrace. While it’s true that Canadians’ and western Europeans’ life expectancy is higher than Americans’, it’s not because of their price-controlled drugs and government health services. The gap is due to variables that have nothing to do with health-care systems: the higher rates in America of poverty, obesity, smoking, homicide, fatal accidents and other factors.
The gap would be even larger if it weren’t for the fact that Americans receive better health care, particularly for heart disease and cancer. And the chief reason that American patients fare better than European patients is that they get earlier access to more new drugs. A dollar spent on drugs does more to combat disease and disability than a dollar spent anywhere else.
Yes, Canadians and Europeans pay less at the pharmacy, but they’re getting what they pay for. Why would Trump want to copy them? He should look at the numbers. Americans already get a much better deal.
...
Zytiga hasn’t been as newsy, but it’s a worthier poster drug because it does reflect a widespread and fundamental problem with the European system. This prostate-cancer drug received brief attention in connection with Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the Libyan convicted of plotting the bombing of a Pan Am plane over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. He was sentenced to life in prison in Scotland but released in 2009. The release, which generated international outrage, was justified on compassionate grounds after British doctors determined that he had less than three months to live because his prostate cancer was “resistant to any treatment options of known effectiveness.”
After returning to Libya, he received treatments not offered in the United Kingdom, including Zytiga, a new drug that dramatically increased survival rates. It was developed by Johnson & Johnson and launched first in the United States, where al-Megrahi’s family reportedly procured it. Instead of dying within three months, he lived for almost three more years (generating more outrage). During that time, the British government rejected Zytiga as too expensive to be offered to patients in the National Health Service. Shortly after al-Megrahi’s death in 2012, the drug won approval for use by a limited number of patients in England, but it took another three years to be approved in Scotland, and even then, it was limited to a minority of men with prostate cancer (those who had already undergone other therapy). The frustration of the majority was summed up in 2016 by the Express newspaper in a headline: CANCER DRUG “GOOD ENOUGH FOR LOCKERBIE BOMBER” WILL NOT BE GIVEN TO SCOTS NHS PATIENTS.
Zytiga is not an isolated example. All kinds of patients die in Europe waiting for drugs already available to Americans. The hub of pharmaceutical innovation has moved from the price-controlled countries of Europe to the United States as companies have shifted laboratories and focus to the market with the best returns. America has been called the “Pharmacy to the World” because it’s where more than half of new drugs are developed and tested in clinical trials.
....
to put those prices in perspective, consider an international comparison published this year by Irene Papanicolas and colleagues at Harvard. Americans spend annually about $1,000 per capita on prescription drugs (of which $150 comes out of their pockets—the rest is covered by insurance). In other affluent countries, the per-capita spending ranges from about $300 in Australia and the Netherlands to about $800 in Switzerland (a distant second to America in developing new drugs). The annual figure is about $400 in the United Kingdom and Japan, $500 in Germany, France, and Sweden, and $600 in Canada and Denmark.
So the average difference between the U.S. and the other countries on drug spending is about $500 a year per person, hardly an astronomical sum to pay for better health, especially considering how much more money is spent in the rest of the health-care system.
Link: https://www.city-journal.org/price-controls-on-pharmaceuticals
“They never take into account the cost of research and development involved. They only want to pay for the cost of production.”
That is why Americans have to pay for the product PLUS all the R&D on the drugs that make it to market PLUS the drugs that die in the labs and trials.
The world is freeloading on the backs of American consumers AGAIN.
“On Nov. 15, the D.C. Office of the Chief Medical Examiner declared the death a suicide, saying Best succumbed to “multiple blunt force injuries” without providing further details, according to Cleveland.com.”
Wow, more stellar detective work from the DC authorities. Because people commit suicide by beating themselves to death all the time. Or when Seth Rich was found shot in the back outside his home in the middle of the night, with his wallet untouched, it was a “botched robbery”. Uh, yeah, sure.
“They never take into account the cost of research and development involved. They only want to pay for the cost of production.”
If you believe That whopper I got a nice bridge to sell you.
These numbers came out of a South Carolina Court decision on accusations JNJ/Risperdal defrauded their State Medicaid program.
“Annual Sales of Risperdal worldwide per annual reports of Johnson & Johnson, Inc.
1994: $0.172 Billion
1995: $0.343 Billion
1996: $0.502 Billion
1998: $0.588 Billion
1999: $0.892 Billion
2000: $1.083 Billion
2001: $1.845 Billion
2002: $2.146 Billion
2003: $2.512 Billion
2004: $3.05 Billion
2005: $3.552 Billion
2006: $4.180 Billion
2007: $4.697 Billion
2008: $1.309 Billion
2009: $1.425 Billion
2010: $1.50 Billion
Total for the period: $29.796 Billion
Testimony at trial indicated that the profit margin for sales of Risperdal was 97% or $28.90 Billion for the period of 1994-2010”
#13.
“Forget it Innovative. It’s DC.”
This is the going theory with this story....that he fell or jumped. Most of what’s in this area of town is new construction (past twenty years) and no more than four floors. Maybe he got up on the roof, and just accidentally fell while taking a smoke.
They should be able to arrange a quick cremation.
The Ron Brown School of Medical Examiners.
This is such a scam. A medicine that I used to pay $180 for, or less if I took the time to send in the rebate, has more than doubled. The patent ran out and no one is making a generic. After speaking with the pharmacist, amazingly the prices went up, right after obamacare was signed into law. If you try to get it through Medicaid the price goes up even higher.
Take away the cost to the individual, obamacare was nothing more than a kickback scheme to the insurance companies and drug makers. More government hacks taking care of their sugar daddy’s.
He slammed his garage door to many times on his head!
DC POLICE are the most INCOMPETENT in the world!! Suicide my ass!
“Americans often pay much higher prices than people in other countries.”
The reason Americans pay more for drugs is that other countries have price controls. This makes it unprofitable to sell drugs to those countries. Therefore, a deal has been worked out between countries that in order for the FDA to approve a drug the companies must agree to sell a predetermined allotment to the various controlled markets at an agreed price that is usually lower than the cost of production. They then make up the difference by charging the American consumer a higher price. Thus the American consumer is underwriting the socialist cost of drugs in other countries. If those countries allow the internet sale of the drug to Americans at lower prices (thus huge profits) it means that drugs easily available in the US are often not available in foreign countries.
Nothing dealing with drugs is as simple as it seems at first glance.
don’t be foolish. it means he jumped or was pushed.
Yeah, right...because there is no drug R&D outside of the US... jeez...
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