And of course, Jeffrey Epstein.
Why is the Biden administration so afraid to do anything different from Trump? Biden got the most votes; he should start acting like he won the election. Between this and the total cave in on letting Medicare negotiate drug prices it seems like Biden is afraid of making either Mike Pompeo or the drug companies mad.
Negotiating drug prices would fight inflation and the billions saved could be used either to fund other programs or reduce the deficit. Why does the Biden administration fail to even point fingers at the Senators who are responsible, name them and make them explain?
Please share widely!
Americans have access to new, safe, and innovative prescription medications years before the rest of the world. We collectively pay a premium for that early access.
The restraints on the ability of Medicare to negotiate lower prices on medications is one way that we pay that premium.
Nope. First of all, Medicare drug prices have little or nothing to do with inflation. Reducing the deficit is a right-wing talking point and red herring — there is no need to reduce the deficit at all.
Whatever savings might accrue would almost certainly be offset by decreased availability of life-saving new drugs. I’m not at all sure how many Americans would prefer to wait three years to have access to those new drugs at lower prices rather than getting them now for the price that Medicare now charges.
The real issue here is our utterly dysfunctional for-profit health care industry.
This is misguided fantasy.
Step One: Good luck identifying a process for funding this, qualified people to make it happen, and quantifying the results in any meaningful way. The pipeline that connects a desired disease target to a safe and effective medication for that target is measured in decades. The only government agency that works on anything like that timeline is the DoD. For a long list of excellent reasons, many aspects of that pipeline are shrouded in extreme secrecy.
Step Two: There is no current government regulation that blocks any drug from being manufactured generically. It sounds as though what you’re really proposing is to remove all intellectual property protections from US pharma activities. There is no better way to drive ALL pharma research elsewhere
Step Three: I invite you to offer even a single example where federal regulation of compensation has produced the desired outcome.
Step Four: More likely is sit back and watch the quality of life of yourself, your loved ones, and your community shrivel and die as life-saving drugs disappear from pharmacies in the US.
Step Five: Enjoy being bombarded with one violent movie ad after another, or one pet food ad after another, or one car ad after another. This appears to be another case where the cold reality of supply and demand is absent from your commentary. Lowering the price per ad of network advertising (by reducing demand) causes the amount of advertising to INCREASE, rather than decrease. As each spot becomes cheaper, its buyers spend less — rather than more — money producing it. The quality of each spot goes down.
It seems to me that the relationship between the DoD and its contractors is a reasonably good analogy — for better or worse — to the relationship between whatever government agency runs the contemplated single-payer government-sponsors health care system and the various pharma and health-care delivery companies that compete for contracts from that agency.
Transparency in general and intellectual property rights in particular are likely to be restricted, rather than expanded, in such a model.
I strongly encourage you to fact-check that assertion, and invite you offer a citation of its source. Along the way, you might clarify what you mean by “new drug research”.
For example, a HUGE portion of pharma basic research spending is focused on “target discovery” — identifying a specific element of the pipeline that causes a particular disorder or disorders that is amenable to pharmaceutical intervention. Another huge area of basic research spending is the discovery of “Novel Molecular Entities” (NME).
While it is true that NIH (the pharma research arm of the federal government) is the largest single source of basic research funding, it is nowhere near even a majority player — never mind 75%.
I encourage you to read the following relevant analysis from the NIH:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7642989/.
I’ve done so several times. I’d suggest you familiarize yourself with Mariana Mazzucato, an economist with dual Italian–US citizenship. She is a professor at University College London in Economics of Innovation and Public Value.
Again, we are talking about new drugs, not minor manipulations of existing compounds in order to extend a patent.
And it turns out that a full 75 percent of the new molecular entities with priority rating are actually funded in boring, Kafka-ian public sector labs. This doesn’t mean that Big Pharma is not spending on innovation. They do. They spend on the marketing part. They spend on the D part of R&D. They spend an awful lot on buying back their stock, which is quite problematic. In fact, companies like Pfizer and Amgen recently have spent more money in buying back their shares to boost their stock price than on R&D,
If you restrict the discussion to research spending that results in a new drug, then you’re excluding HUGE amounts of necessary spending. Tens or hundreds of candidates have to be researched in order to find one that leads to a drug. It sounds like you’re excluding everything except the winners.
Similarly, you second paragraph includes this qualification: “with priority rating”. Nobody knows, at the outset, whether a given NME is going to get a “priority rating”.
Dean Baker is the most prominent economist advocating the steps that johntmay has posted. If there are flaws in Baker’s analysis, I haven’t seen them. Certainly not in this thread.
Are you sure that Mr. Baker advocates the above bullets?
For example, regarding direct funding, I find this in https://cepr.net/evil-doers-the-pharmaceutical-industry-and-the-pandemic/ (emphasis mine):
Regarding the above step 3, I find this in the same piece:
It doesn’t appear to me that Dean Baker advocates the above bullets at all. Repeating buzzwords is not the same as agreeing.
Surely you aren’t making the case that the current system of developing new planes, submarines, and weapons systems is transparent. How long would it take, in such an approach, for us to be reading about $100K toilets in pharma lavatories?
If there are arguments in support of the five steps offered above, I haven’t seen them. Certainly not in this thread.
Tom, in your opinion, what drives those who seek to discover new pharmaceuticals?
Do you mean companies or individuals?
I have only anecdotal data about individual scientists who strive to discover new pharmaceuticals — colleagues and friends that I’ve worked with over the past two decades.
ALL of those have been motivated by a desire to make a contribution, a passion to discover new things, and a love of science.
The successful companies that I’ve known have all been driven by a combination of at least two things:
For example, Eric Lander was a founder and driving force for Millennium Pharmaceuticals. He is now the director of the Office Science and Technology Policy and is the Science Advisor to the president (a cabinet-level position). He is also the Founding Director of the Broad Institute (in Cambridge), a Professor of Biology at MIT, and Professor of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School.
I’ve also known some pharma companies that were unscrupulous frauds — on par with any of the Trump schemes. I won’t name names, since they won’t matter anyway.
I mean individuals. Companies have one goal: Money.
If the individual is driven by the desire to mane a contribution, a passion to discover new things, and a love of science, then why not simply agree to fund these individuals with federal funds?
The desire to make a fortune for the founders/owners has resulted in the USA having the highest drug costs in the world – AND- the opioid crisis. Without a patent and commission driven sales staff, Perdue Pharma would not have the incentive to addict millions of Americans on their profitable drug.
There is no downside to federal funding of all qualified drug research and development from the perspective of the men and women who do the actual work and have the passion to seek and develop these compounds.
Anecdotally, I too have many friends who are in pharmaceutical research. My cousin is Dr. Robert Gallo.
I also have a few acquaintances who are in pharmaceutical sales. Many of them make more than nurses and doctors. None of them have a background in science, biology, or medicine. “Ed” is a Pharma sales manager who makes about $200K a year. He has a BA in business and started out in copier sales. “Terry” makes about $175K a year as a drug sales rep. His degree is in hospitality – hotel management. His previous job was selling home improvements; vinyl siding and window replacement. “Maggie” is married to the son of a friend of mine. Her degree is in English literature. She is a charming charismatic young women who works as a sales rep for a major Pharma company and started at $125K a year. That is all part of why we pay so much for healthcare.
The Key to Cheap Drugs: Pay Research Costs Upfront – Center for Economic and Policy Research (cepr.net)
Without any doubt Dean Baker advocates ideas very similar to what JohnTMay posted. The hostility and condescension you continually display looks particularly bad when combined with poor research. But don’t get discouraged. Keep working on that list of lifesaving drugs developed in the US that won’t be available in Europe for years.
Without a doubt your comment shows your confirmation bias.
“Now Biden appears likely to join a list which includes former presidents Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump. All of them pledged to tackle high drug costs, and all of them failed at the hands of the deep-pocketed industry. . . .” https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/10/29/nation/bitter-pill-biden-suffers-familiar-defeat-prescription-drug-prices/?et_rid=1809969847&s_campaign=todaysheadlines:newsletter
I agree that there is a critical need to restructure our entire health care system — including big pharma, the health insurance racket, and the health care provider racket.
I agree that a long list of presidents have tried and failed to accomplish this (it goes back all the way to FDR).
The attempt to change the Medicare prescription policies and constraints is a misguided distraction from those more fundamental requirements. I’m reminded of the similarly misguided attempts to avoid taxing wealth by instead raising the top bracket of the income tax. Each is an essentially deceptive attempt to avoid tackling the real issue(s) and instead pandering to those who don’t know better.
These are deeply-rooted and fundamental components of the US economy. They aren’t amenable to quick bumper-sticker fixes.
This, to me, is the fundamental difference between Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. Ms. Warren knows what she’s talking about and understands what needs to change and how to do it. Mr. Sanders relies on bumper-stickers and slogans to cover his fundamental lack of insight into these difficult issues. I’m not talking about political chops here, I’m talking about who I trust to make informed policy decisions.
We need to replace the entire pharma/insurer/provider morass with single-payer government-sponsored health care. No amount of tinkering with Medicare is going to change that — short of transforming Medicare itself (“Medicare for all”).
Once we have accomplished Medicare For All, the entire landscape changes — for the better. The agency responsible for single-payer government-sponsored health care will negotiate prices for ALL prescription drugs in the US.
I think that solves the problem we’ve been debating on this thread.
“there is a critical need to restructure our entire health care system “
The problem with this is that last year we were all encouraged to vote for a candidate who explicitly promised to veto any single payer plan that came across his desk.
Until we have a president who is committed to single payer, it hardly makes sense to characterize as a distraction such a common sense reform as giving Medicare the ability to make the best deal to consumers and taxpayers.
A huge majority of all Americans support this change. Maybe it should go through Congress as a stand alone bill, if Sinema and Scott Peters insist on excluding it from BBB.
This is a winning issue and it shouldn’t die in a back room deal.
Yes indeed, agreed.
Perhaps even more important than ANY of this is ensuring that Democrats increase the majority in 2022 and 2024 — especially in the Senate. That’s the most effective way to moot the opinion of Mr. Manchin or Ms. Sinema.
Equally important is to block the current effort of the GOP to overturn any state election they don’t like. The voting rights legislation that accomplishes that is FAR more important than this Medicare drug pricing spat.
Like it or not, there were no candidates in the 2020 primary campaign who supported single-payer government-sponsored healthcare and who got more than a handful of minority voters.
The single strongest force driving the political system today is an insurrection led by angry whites that seeks to enshrine white supremacy throughout our entire society.
Medicare drug pricing is completely irrelevant to that.
It seems to me that the single most important thing for Democrats to be doing right now is putting down the insurrection.
Biden was not proposing single payer, but I don’t recall a promise to veto it. Usually when Dems object to single payer it’s on pragmatic rather than substantive grounds.
That is absolutely NOT the case. I invite you to offer a cite to a video clip or reliable first-hand report of Mr. Biden making such an explicit promise.
The closest I’ve found is a one-on-one interview with Lawrence O’Donnell. Mr. Biden’s responses in that interview were distorted by a great many sources — Mr. Biden did NOT say he would veto “any single payer plan that came across his desk.”
He said, instead, that he would veto Medicare For All unless it was accompanied by a mechanism for paying for its 10-year $33T cost ($3.3T).
The current proposals for a genuine wealth tax — especially if combined with a return to a 77% top bracket of the gift/estate tax — meet the criteria that Mr. Biden laid out.
I suggest that you should either offer a credible source to support this allegation or walk it back.
“Americans have access to new, safe, and innovative prescription medications years before the rest of the world. We collectively pay a premium for that early access.”
I reject the trickle-down approach to research, which is no more desirable than trickle-down approach anywhere else. It is much more efficient to simply fund the research directly. That would be true even your outlandish claim about drug availability had some basis in fact.
But really. What life saving drugs are currently available in the US that won’t be available in Europe for years? Once a new drug is developed how is it kept away from the rest of the world? Is there some kind of embargo?
I’m curious how you reach the conclusion that prices have “little or nothing” to do with inflation.
Reducing the deficit is a right-wing talking point that has been embraced by the Biden administration, which has touted the current bill by saying that it is “fully paid for”. I don’t know if you have been following the news lately, but the bill has been gutted by people who claim we can’t afford the spending. Well, this isn’t spending, it is saving.
What is the connection between the headline and the body of this diary?
There is none. It’s just clickbait, and it works.
Sorry Chris and Tom that I assumed that you had been following the Assange case. Here is where it stands in present. The British government refused to extradite Assange on the grounds that he would not be safe in the US prison system. The US justice department is appealing that ruling this week and is arguing in British court that Assange would be safe in a US prison. I thought it would be relevant to point out how the US prison system has failed to protect other high profile prisoners recently.
Still waiting for that list of life saving drugs that are available to Americans but are years away from being available overseas. The Washington Post put the cost of not negotiating with the pharma companies at $700 billion over ten years so I hope that list of drugs is long and impressive.
And I wrote about drug pricing and Julian Assange in the same post because both are instances of the Biden administration failing to do change Trump era policies. Trump started the prosecution of Assange; Biden is prolonging it. Trump and Biden both claimed to be against the prohibition against Medicare negotiating drug prices, and under both administrations, that prohibition remains in effect.
While no evidence has emerged that Trump won the election, there is mounting evidence that he might as well have.
Like I said, clickbait.
Have you considered a career as a content moderator for Facebook? 🙂
The prosecution of Mr. Assange began in 2010. We know that then-Attorney General Eric Holder announced in November of 2010 that Mr. Assange “was under criminal investigation”. We don’t know any details because the entire case was kept secret from the public.
If you believe that Donald Trump started the prosecution of Julian Assange, then perhaps I can interest you in purchasing a lifetime pass to the Cape Cod Tunnel for a very reasonable price.
Under the Obama administration, Assange was investigated, but not charged Reportedly the Justice Department decided that charging Assange would be seen as an attack on press freedom.
Those charges were filed by the Trump justice department.
We don’t know — and probably will never know — what secret information was exchanged and what secret deals were made with Sweden and other foreign nations. We know that Mr. Assange was jailed in Sweden on fabricated charges.
We know that Mr. Assange has been imprisoned since 2010, and has not yet been convicted of anything.
We know that the US government is much more eager to imprison anyone who reveals the truth about US military war crimes than to investigate, prosecute, and convict government officials who order those war crimes. That distasteful reality existed long before Donald Trump hijacked the GOP.
The tradition of protecting US war criminals is as old as protecting abusive cops and — for that matter — abusive clergy.
I suspect that whatever charges were brought during the Donald Trump administration would have also been brought if Ms. Clinton had been president.
“In fact, Department of Justice officials in President Barack Obama’s administration ultimately decided they could not prosecute Assange for revealing national security secrets, described as one of the largest compromises of classified information in U.S. history, because it risked criminalizing subsequent national security journalism.
“During the Obama administration it was called ‘the New York Times problem,’ ” after the newspaper’s distinguished record of publishing information on national security matters the U.S. government has deemed secret, said Stephen Rohde, a historian and constitutional law expert, and a past chair of the Southern California branch of the American Civil Liberties Union. “In other words, how can we indict him for espionage when we’re confident he’s a journalist, a publisher and enjoys First Amendment rights.”
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/02/23/julian-assange-whats-stake-if-u-s-prosecutes-wikileaks-founder/4734934002/
@“In fact, Department of Justice officials …”
Speaking of irrelevant — nobody has disputed that public charges were not brought against Mr. Assange.
This is unresponsive to the question of what secret information and deals were made with friendly foreign nations like Sweden.
Mr. Assange remains incarcerated. He has been incarcerated for more than a decade. The question of whether and when public charges were brought is irrelevant — he’s in jail, and is likely to stay in jail for the foreseeable future.
“I suspect that whatever charges were brought during the Donald Trump administration would have also been brought if Ms. Clinton had been president.”
So what? What do your suspicions about what might have happened under Ms Clinton have to do with anything?
It must be getting crowded in that cape cod tunnel with all those moving goalposts.
They have approximately as much relevance as the following:
Moving goalposts indeed.
That’s OK, there are apparently those who believe President Obama should have done more to prevent 9/11!
Obviously something has triggered you Tom. You seem to agree with me that the attempt to extradite Assange should stop. Can we make that agreement explicit?
I think I am pretty solid ground in saying that the Trump Justice department escalated the US attack on Assange by filing charges and getting him kidnapped from the Ecuadorian Embassy.
The Obama/Biden administration’s campaign against Assange was already horrible and a criminal act in itself. I said so on this blog at the time. (My memory is that my view was in the minority here but maybe I wasn’t). Nothing since has changed my view but the Trump people took that persecution up a notch, and Biden is now running with the same discredited case that Trump filed.
That case has already lost once in the UK. The US should drop the appeal. That’s the minimum they should do.
Do you agree with this or not?
I agree with all this. I believe that Mr. Assange should be released from prison and allowed to live out his days in freedom.
I do not agree with your attempt to conflate Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump.
Why are we defending the scum that is Julian Assange? If he allegedly committed crimes chargeable by the US then of course we should try to get him here to try him.
Julian Assange is not being persecuted because he is “scum” (your characterization, not mine).
America has had a long and contentious relationship between law enforcement and outspoken members of the Fourth Estate.
Legitimate journalists who acquire and publish material that is embarrassing or damaging to US interests have long been persecuted and prosecuted by US government actors. Sometimes the government prevails, sometimes the journalists.
Not all of those journalists have been fine and upstanding icons of morality. That is irrelevant to the question of whether they do or not have the right to publish their material. I think it’s VERY dangerous when we start incarcerating people who publish TRUTH about government behavior.
The issue with the current insurrectionists is that they publish and profit from lies. The issue with Julian Assange and WikiLeaks is that pretty much EVERYTHING he published was absolutely TRUE.
There is a WORLD of difference.
A legitimate journalist who publishes truthful material that is lawfully acquired should not be jailed for that act. The journalist should not be jailed in the US, nor Sweden, nor England, nor Australia.
That principle is why I am opposing the efforts to persecute (because that’s what’s been happening) and incarcerate (because that’s what’s happened) Julian Assange.
I was under the impression that it was not lawfully acquired and that he in fact not just acquired the material, but contributed to its illegal acquisition. There also may be legitimate secrets that he should never have been privy to.
Whoa, slow down.
I fear you may be losing track of the players.
Mr. Assange received the massive disclosure that we’re talking about from Chelsea Manning. Ms. Manning acquired the secret and sensitive material which WikiLeaks published. Ms. Manning was charged with and pleaded guilty to violating various laws when she acquired the material that she uploaded to WikiLeaks.
Mr. Assange was arrested and jailed in Sweden on a charge of rape that he denied and that was eventually dropped.
After Ms. Manning’s guilty plea, federal prosecutors allege that Mr. Assange helped Ms. Manning acquire the material by helping Ms. Manning crack a password. That is, at the moment, nothing more than an allegation.
The Pentagon Papers were not lawfully acquired by Daniel Ellsberg. The Supreme Court ruled that the New York Times and Washington Post nevertheless had the right to publish those papers because Daniel Ellsberg took the papers — the publications committed no crime in publishing them once they were received.
Mr. Assange had already been imprisoned years before federal prosecutors made the so-far unsupported allegation that Mr. Assange illegally helped Ms. Manning acquire the sensitive material.
Material leaked by Ms. Manning and published by Mr. Assange had more in common with Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon papers than anything else. Daniel Ellsberg was cleared by a federal judge in 1973 because of gross misconduct by federal authorities.
When the federal government lies to the American public, Americans have a right to know about that.
THAT is why I defend Mr. Assange.