Explain this to me

[jpgray]

The consumer price index rose 13.3% over the last five years, while the prices of the most popular drugs rose 41.5%. The pharmaceutical industry remains the most profitable industry in the United States.

How can you have an Affordable Care Act, how can you discuss deficit spending on health care, how can you even be a serious advocate for any citizen with a prescription without addressing this problem?

Transferring the burden from individuals to the government via public subsidy is a mere transference of the fleecing shears - it makes a part of our hole more comfortable, but stopping all digging in one corner while starting a new excavation a few feet away is not addressing the problem of being trapped in the hole.

We do not lack for leverage - our market is massive and pays exorbitantly for drugs thanks to decidedly non-free and cartel-like laws regulating the market. To compel reasonable reductions in price (well beyond a superficial reduction of the "doughnut hole&quot would be as simple as allowing re-importation or negotiation akin to the VA for Medicare. Limitation on patent law for pharmaceuticals would be another viable threat.

Of these re-importation is nearly impossible to argue against, because the same pills made in the same factory cannot constitute separate hazards to the consumer, and it would place any free marketeer politician in an exceedingly uncomfortable position, the exposure being either crass corruption or rank hypocrisy.

This would also prove incredibly popular if everyone I have ever met or heard of would be any judge. Why isn't it done? Why not take on pharmaceutical companies' extortion when we can threaten them so thoroughly and so fairly?

[renie408]

1. I think it has something to do with the fact that nobody really gives a shit about us. n/t

[SammyWinstonJack]

7. There you go....that's it, in a nutshell.

And really, why should they, they've got theirs.

[TheMastersNemesis]

2. Here's The Problem

The problem now is Citizens United and the flood of cash. It is very hard to vote for the right thing because every politician now faces intimidation. When a company can come into your office and threaten millions of dollars against you in the next election, it is very hard to resist. Unfortunately most politicians are not that brave.

We cannot reign in these companies unless we can elect enough politicians to get the laws passed.

[Lint Head]

3. Conspiracy. Isn't this suppose to be in a different forum? Illuminati, Bilderbergers etc.

Alex Jones stuff.

[jpgray]

4. I wish Billy Tauzin were a conspiracy theory

Unfortunately the theory of hideous corruption and revolving door graft plausibly and simply explains the phenomena in his case.

[woo me with science]

5. Observing and describing the clear influence of corporate money in our government

is hardly conspiracy theory.

[woo me with science]

6. K&R