Government Big Pharma And The People

Pharmaceuticals constitute a relatively small share of the total Health Care expenditure in most developed economies, and yet they play a critical role in the ongoing debate over how best to advance, improve, and afford Health Care. Despite this, and perhaps because of this, the industry has had, for many years, an outsized claim to fame and controversy, praise and criticisms, and support and condemnation. Unfortunately, many participants in the debate do not fully understand the complexities of the industry and its role in the overall Health Care system. The analytical tools of economics provide a strong foundation for a better understanding of the dynamics of the pharmaceutical industry, its contribution to Health and Health Care, and its dual and often conflicting priorities of affordability and innovation, as well as the various Private and Public Policy initiatives directed at the sector. Everyone is affected by Big Pharma and the products they produce. At the Drug store, the physician’s office, in front of the television, in everyday conversations, Drugs are a part of our lives. Society shapes our values toward Drugs and Drugs shape society. ("The Pill" and minor tranquilizers are good examples.) And, of course, the way Congress deliberates and Big Pharma responds has a huge impact on how Drugs affect our lives. This book is well-researched on the subject of the pharmaceutical industry, its struggles with Government, and its relationship to the consumer from the early twentieth century until the present. The Dynamic Tension between the three participants – Government, Big Pharma, and the People – is described and explained to lead to an understanding of the controversies that rage today. The author describes how the Government, its many investigatory efforts, and the ultimate legislative results affect the industry and the consequences of their activities are explored in light of their effects on other players, including the patients and consumers who rely on both Government and Big Pharma for their well-being and who find sometimes unexpected consequences while giving special attention to the attitudes, beliefs, and misadventures of less-than-optimal Drug use. Stakeholders are identified with physicians as a major focus, as well as describing the significance of prescriptions as social objects and the processes by which physicians make choices on behalf of their patients. The author ties it all together with how Big Pharma affects and is affected by each of these groups. The author utilizes his 50-plus years’ experience as an academic, practicing pharmacist, and Big Pharma employee to describe the scope of the pharmaceutical industry and how it affects us on a daily basis, concluding with an inside look at Big Pharma and how regulations, marketing, and the press have affected their business, both good and bad.

During her two decades at The New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Marcia Angell had a front-row seat on the appalling spectacle of the pharmaceutical industry. She watched drug companies stray from their original mission of discovering and manufacturing useful drugs and instead become vast marketing machines with unprecedented control over their own fortunes. She saw them gain nearly limitless influence over medical research, education, and how doctors do their jobs. She sympathized as the American public, particularly the elderly, struggled and increasingly failed to meet spiraling prescription drug prices. Now, in this bold, hard-hitting new book, Dr. Angell exposes the shocking truth of what the pharmaceutical industry has become–and argues for essential, long-overdue change. Currently Americans spend a staggering $200 billion each year on prescription drugs. As Dr. Angell powerfully demonstrates, claims that high drug prices are necessary to fund research and development are unfounded: The truth is that drug companies funnel the bulk of their resources into the marketing of products of dubious benefit. Meanwhile, as profits soar, the companies brazenly use their wealth and power to push their agenda through Congress, the FDA, and academic medical centers. Zeroing in on hugely successful drugs like AZT (the first drug to treat HIV/AIDS), Taxol (the best-selling cancer drug in history), and the blockbuster allergy drug Claritin, Dr. Angell demonstrates exactly how new products are brought to market. Drug companies, she shows, routinely rely on publicly funded institutions for their basic research; they rig clinical trials to make their products look better than they are; and they use their legions of lawyers to stretch out government-granted exclusive marketing rights for years. They also flood the market with copycat drugs that cost a lot more than the drugs they mimic but are no more effective. The American pharmaceutical industry needs to be saved, mainly from itself, and Dr. Angell proposes a program of vital reforms, which includes restoring impartiality to clinical research and severing the ties between drug companies and medical education. Written with fierce passion and substantiated with in-depth research, The Truth About the Drug Companies is a searing indictment of an industry that has spun out of control.

UPDATED AND REVISED EDITION: Throughout his distinguished legal career, Stephen Sheller has relished the role of the underdog, evincing a sharply honed sense of fair play and justice. Early in his career, he represented Black Panthers in Philadelphia when they were arrested on trumped up murder and conspiracy charges. Later, he was in the vanguard of lawyers who took on the tobacco industry in the 1990s and he reprised that strategy a few years later in targeting Big Pharma for its harmful products and their deleterious effects on public health. In Big Pharma, Big Greed The inside story of one lawyer's battle to stem the flood of dangerous medicines and protect public health Sheller tells a tale that is at once deeply personal but also with wide repercussions for the U.S. health care system and the hundreds of millions of Americans whose lives literally depend on it. Decades of litigating against the pharmaceutical industry taught Sheller one irreducible lesson: In too many instances, unneeded and at times dangerous drugs are foisted on the public without adequate warning as to risks, all in the service of boosting industry profits. All too often, achieving block buster status for a patent protected medication becomes an end in itself, as Big Pharma companies manipulate clinical trial data, draft scholarly articles for friendly physicians often in their pay, and market their drugs for uses that never had been approved by the federal Food and Drug Administration. This last practice proved to be something of an Achilles Heel for the industry. In litigation that resulted in settlement and fines in the billions, companies such as Eli Lilly acknowledged marketing drugs off label to a broad range of patients for whom the medications had never been approved. Sheller's litigation formed the basis for these settlements and the effort is ongoing. He and other plaintiffs' lawyers now are suing Janssen Pharmaceuticals for the adverse impacts of its drug, Risperdal, a second generation anti-psychotic that Sheller and others allege is linked to the growth of female breast tissue in young boys and men. Already there have been several big jury verdicts against Janssen with hundreds of more cases yet to be tried. In the book, Sheller not only recounts his major litigation battles but also makes sweeping proposals for industry reform. To restore regulatory credibility, Sheller proposes that responsibility for testing new medicines be taken away from the industry and given over to hospitals and other public entities partnering with government regulators. Pharmaceutical companies that betray the public trust would risk government- initiated dissolution. Harsh medicine to be sure, but Sheller believes entirely appropriate to the underlying malady.

For readers of Bad Blood and Empire of Pain, an authoritative look at monopoly medicine from the dawn of patents through the race for COVID-19 vaccines and how the privatization of public science has prioritized profits over people Owning the Sun tells the story of one of the most contentious fights in human history: the legal right to produce lifesaving medicines. Medical science began as a discipline geared toward the betterment of all human life, but the merging of research with intellectual property and the rise of the pharmaceutical industry warped and eventually undermined its ethical foundations. Since World War II, federally funded research has facilitated most major medical breakthroughs, yet these drugs are often wholly controlled by price-gouging corporations with growing international ambitions. Why does the U.S. government fund the development of medical science in the name of the public only to relinquish exclusive rights to drug companies, and how does such a system impoverish us, weaken our responses to crises, and, as in the cases of AIDS and COVID-19, put the world at risk? Outlining how generations of public health and science advocates have attempted to hold the line against Big Pharma and their allies in government, Alexander Zaitchik’s first-of-its-kind history documents the rise of privatized medicine in the United States and its subsequent globalization. From the controversial arrival of patent-wielding German drug firms in the late nineteenth century to present-day coordination between industry and philanthropic organizations—including the influential Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation—that stymie international efforts to vaccinate the world against COVID-19, Owning the Sun tells one of the most important and least understood histories of our time.

HOW YOU CAN SURVIVE "HEALTHCARE," THE LARGEST AND MOST CORRUPT INDUSTRY IN AMERICA. ?? Learn what works. ? See through the lies. ? Handle hospitals. ? Find trustworthy doctors. ? Master your drugs and quit them with confidence. ? Consider holistic medicine.Healthcare is the top cause of all our overdue debts and personal bankruptcy. Our medical spending per person is double that of other countries', but fully half the treatments are ineffective or harmful. Immense, predatory industries such as angioplasty and coronary artery bypass surgery victimize us. These procedures cause complications and deaths, but few patients survive even a day longer. Most back and endoscopic knee surgeries are equally worthless. Seventy percent of us are on prescriptions, and 20 percent take over five. One in six uses psychiatric medicine, which commonly causes irreversible brain damage and premature death. Millions are now addicted to prescription opioids. Fifty-thousand people die each year from overdoses. The FDA allows big Pharma to falsify the studies required to patent drugs. These corporations hire armies of ghostwriters to stuff websites and medical journal articles with marketing lies. Finding the truth is now nearly impossible. But all this gets overlooked as the companies pay billions of dollars in criminal settlements nearly every year. Money short-circuits everyone's integrity, but there is an alternative. Patients and doctors can still prevail. Learn the system, and you can too.

"Exorbitant prices for lifesaving drugs, safety recalls affecting tens of millions of Americans, and soaring rates of addiction and overdose on prescription opioids have caused many to lose faith in pharmaceutical companies. Now, Americans are demanding national reckoning with a monolithic industry. In Pharma, award-winning journalist and New York Times best-selling author Gerald Posner uncovers the real story of the Sacklers, the family that became one of America's wealthiest from the success of OxyContin, their blockbuster narcotic painkiller at the centure of the opioid crisis. The unexpected twists and turns of the Sakler family saga are told against the startling chronicle of a powerful industry that sits at the intersection of public health and profits. Pharma reveals how and why American drug companies have put earnings ahead of patients"--

HOW YOU CAN SURVIVE "HEALTHCARE," THE LARGEST AND MOST CORRUPT INDUSTRY IN AMERICA. ✪ Learn what works. ✪ See through the lies. ✪ Handle hospitals. ✪ Find trustworthy doctors. ✪ Master your drugs and quit them with confidence. ✪ Consider holistic medicine. Healthcare is the top cause of all our overdue debts and personal bankruptcy. Our medical spending per person is double that of other countries', but fully half the treatments are ineffective or harmful. Immense, predatory industries such as angioplasty and coronary artery bypass surgery victimize us. These procedures cause complications and deaths, but few patients survive even a day longer. Most back and endoscopic knee surgeries are equally worthless. Seventy percent of us are on prescriptions, and 20 percent take over five. One in six uses psychiatric medicine, which commonly causes irreversible brain damage and premature death. Millions are now addicted to prescription opioids. Fifty-thousand people die each year from overdoses. The FDA allows big Pharma to falsify the studies required to patent drugs. These corporations hire armies of ghostwriters to stuff websites and medical journal articles with marketing lies. Finding the truth is now nearly impossible. But all this gets overlooked as the companies pay billions of dollars in criminal settlements nearly every year. Money short-circuits everyone's integrity, but there is an alternative. Patients and doctors can still prevail. Learn the system, and you can too.