Huffington Post: America's Most Admired Lawbreaker By Steven Brill
Over the course of 20 years, Johnson & Johnson created a powerful drug, promoted it illegally to children and the elderly, covered up the side effects and made billions of dollars. This is the inside story.
Chapter 1: BACKSTAGE AT JOHNSON & JOHNSON
On May 20, about 100 stock analysts gathered in the ballroom of the Hyatt Regency Hotel in New Brunswick, New Jersey, to hear good news from top executives at Johnson & Johnson: The company had 10 new drugs in the pipeline that might achieve more than a billion dollars in annual sales.
But the real money—about 80 percent of its revenue and 91 percent of its profit—comes not from those consumer favorites, but from Johnson & Johnson’s high-margin medical devices: artificial hips and knees, heart stents, surgical tools and monitoring devices; and from still higher-margin prescription drugs targeting Crohn’s disease (Remicade), cancer (Zytiga, Velcade), schizophrenia (Risperdal), diabetes (Invokana), psoriasis (Stelara), migraines (Topamax), heart disease (Xarelto) and attention deficit disorder (Concerta).
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To Chapter 6:
Meanwhile, Johnson & Johnson was embarking on a 2003 “back to school” campaign (a district manager’s sales report actually called it that) to launch its M-tab version of the pill. M-tabs would dissolve in a child’s mouth and, presumably, quickly control classroom behavior problems. In San Antonio, a manager told his salespeople to hold ice cream parties in pediatricians’ offices to celebrate the launch. Another manager told a rep to be sure to include “lollipops and small toys” in the sample packages she gave to the doctors she called on.
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A very Good Read.
Read It:
= new reply since forum marked as read
Med/Pharm Co .
a superb writer
From a front page/special issue of Time.com 2013:
...Similarly, higher insurance premiums — much of them paid by taxpayers through Obamacare’s subsidies for those who can’t afford insurance but now must buy it — will certainly be the result of three of Obamacare’s best provisions: the prohibitions on exclusions for pre-existing conditions, the restrictions on co-pays for preventive care and the end of annual or lifetime payout caps.
Put simply, with Obamacare we’ve changed the rules related to who pays for what, but we haven’t done much to change the prices we pay.
When you follow the money, you see the choices we’ve made, knowingly or unknowingly.
Over the past few decades, we’ve enriched the labs, drug companies, medical device makers, hospital administrators and purveyors of CT scans, MRIs, canes and wheelchairs. Meanwhile, we’ve squeezed the doctors who don’t own their own clinics, don’t work as drug or device consultants or don’t otherwise game a system that is so gameable. And of course, we’ve squeezed everyone outside the system who gets stuck with the bills.
We’ve created a secure, prosperous island in an economy that is suffering under the weight of the riches those on the island extract.
And we’ve allowed those on the island and their lobbyists and allies to control the debate, diverting us from what Gerard Anderson, a health care economist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, says is the obvious and only issue: “All the prices are too damn high.”
http://time.com/198/bitter-pill-why-medical-bills-are-killing-us/
It's a long article but well worth the read.
In case someone tries to slime Brill again:
Steven Brill (born August 22, 1950) is an American lawyer and journalist-entrepreneur. Brill's most recent reporting and book is concerned with healthcare costs.
Brill was born in Queens, New York. He is a graduate of Deerfield Academy (B.A. 1972) and Yale University law school (J.D. 1975)...
In 1989 Brill founded Court TV (now TruTV) and the network launched on July 1, 1991. Among its original anchors were Fred Graham, who was still at the network twenty years later, Cynthia McFadden and Terry Moran, who later joined ABC News....
...In 2009, Brill and two other media executives created Journalism Online to help newspapers and magazines charge for online access...
...In February 2013 Brill published Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us as a Time magazine magazine cover story. The investigation of billing practices revealed that hospitals and their executives are gaming the system to maximize revenue. Brill claims patients receive bills that have little relationship to the care provided and that the free market in American medicine is a myth, with or without Obamacare. The 24,000-plus word article took up the entire feature section of the magazine, the first time in the history of TIME...
Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Brill_(journalist)
