Bilking Babies and the
Sweet Smell of Success
Sweet Smell of Success
The cost of having a child has just gone up, way up, thanks to the United States Food and Drug Administration, a St. Louis drug company named KV Pharmaceuticals and a drug policy that creates phony wars on drugs, approves some drugs that shouldn't be approved while providing monopolistic status to those with power to influence the process.
The drug called 17P and sold under the name McKenna which had been compounded by local pharmacies for years and cost about $10 per dose was approved by the FDA for KV Pharmaceutical's monopoly on the drug while eliminating the compounding process. KV hiked the price per dose to $1500 each. The Pittsburgh Post Gazette reported.....
The revelation this week that the cost of a popular drug to help prevent preterm labor is going to go up 100 times its current price has stunned pregnant women, their doctors and pharmacists in Western Pennsylvania. ”I’m ready to have a heart attack,” Janice Watkins, a Pittsburgh resident who is pregnant and has been taking the generic drug known as 17P, said Thursday after she learned of the price increase from her doctor’s office. “I’m nervous now because I have to go home and call my insurance company to see if they’ll cover me.”
Obviously, the hike from $10 to $1500 is a mouth full change, as the Pittsburgh paper says, but newspapers widely reported that the former KV Pharmaceutical CEO, Mark Hermelin, pleaded guilty on Thursday, March 10, 2011 to two federal charges of misbranding drugs in an unrelated case. The 69 year old Hamerlin was sentenced to one month in prison and a one million dollar fine, but that has not changed KV's pricing policies, nor the FDA's assertion that they had no part in establishing the monopoly.
Fred W. Chalmers of the FDA watch group Bad Medicine, said "it's like this. The FDA has broad sweeping powers to create wealth with the stoke of a pen. They are not unlike the Army Corp of Engineers which decides whether an area is going to be harvested by oil interests or remain natural habitat, whether a sea wall will create a stable community or be lost to erosion or subsidence. Their decisions are never made in a vacuum. With only the top eight graduates each year from West Point being invited to join the ACE group, they wield extraordinary power and in as much as former West Point grads are often top executives of companies that profit from their decisions it's essentially an extension of the war-spoils system. The same can be said for those who influence the FDA process which always claims to be above the fray. Look at J.D. Searl company's approval of the drug Aspertame better known as the sweetener Equal. The company couldn't get FDA approval so it hired the man Richard Nixon called 'that ruthless little bastard' to dropkick the drug through the FDA process and around the more exacting requirements faced by the earlier sweeteners. That "ruthless little bastard" was future Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld," said Chalmers. "The whole war on drug thing is essentially a scam protecting the private profits and black markets created by the manipulators," concluded Chalmers.
Time Magazines' Maria Svalavitz has reported that "The March of Dimes — which has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations from KV's subsidiary Ther-RX, which will market Makena — supports the introduction of the new drug. "'An FDA-approved product is a good thing, 'says Dr. Alan Fleischman, medical director of the March of Dimes. The drug is expensive but it's a very important drug for a very important purpose. The company has promised that every eligible woman whose doctor prescribes it will be able to receive it and ability to pay will not preclude that." (from More on Time.com: Expecting? Text 'BABY' for Advice About Healthy Pregnancy).
Chalmers said, "that's what you'd expect them to say. The fact is that it is a shell game benefiting the profiteers...in a way similar to Albert Lasker who was America's leading advertising and public relations guru selling cigarettes while his wife was on the board of directors of the America Cancer Society or while paint or asbestos companies knew for over fifty years that their products were injurious, but sold the poisons anyway with protection from the government."
No comments:
Post a Comment