The human right to affordable prescription drug prices Its my firm belief that reasonable prescription medication prices should be the right of everyone in the US
I and many other health consumers believe that the cost of prescription medications are much too high. In fact the general concensus is that they are grossly, unfairly expensive. Many people are without Rx coverage.
The truth is it is far from rare for people on fixed incomes to have to literally choose between food and their health!!! Quite a few of these people don't possess prescription drug plans. I think this is terrible and frankly I hope you do too.
It isn't just persons with limited incomes. It's also working and middle class persons with no prescription plan or no health plan for that matter who suffer.
Some people may presume that individuals on Medicaid have it made since the goverment pays for their medicines. This is not the entire picture. Most Medicaid HMOs include a formulary. This is a list of medications that the Medicaid HMO will pay for. If the prescription is not included in the formulary than it won't be paid for. Technically there is an appeal process. However this is time consuming and there is no guarantee the Rx cost will be supplemented by the Medicaid HMO.
Even regular health insurance for an employee of a company may include restrictions on what meds they cover. One may be thinking my drugs are included in my plan. Well if your health care provider gives you a prescription for a medicine that isn't covered, well to put it politely, "tough toughies". Unless you're able and willing to pay sky rocketing prices you might as well forget it.
Fact: Health Maintenance Organizations all have a formulary. If your medication isn't on it they won't pay for it. It doesn't matter if its Medicaid, business, etc.
Here's a few examples of how pharmaceutical companies rip off the public. Television, popular magazine advertizing. Perhaps you've seen or read these ads. They make the new drug sound like practically the eighth wonder of the world. Notice they rarely mention prices.
There are drugs that are slight variations of older ones. An example would be Celexa and Lexapro. Lexapro is merely a slightly different version of Celexa. True it is somewhat different. But does that justify the hike in cost?
Is it truly a significant improvement over the older drug. Perhaps it is. I suspect though its a way to gouge the American public and make more money for the pharmeceuticals
The US Govt. permits pharmalogical firms to wring every penny from us by allowing them to spend $10,000,000,000 on advertising and bribes. According to the health division of Public Citizen (Ralph Nader-founder,director) most of the drug companies money goes to advertizing and not research and development. Please let me repeat that. Most of the money pharmaceutical firms spend goes to advertizing and NOT research and development. So according to Sidney Wolf MD, the head of the health division of Public Citizen when the pharmaceuticals argue they need to charge those enormous prices for research and development they are lying. The source for the above was "Public Citizen" and Citizens for Consumer Justice, "University Medical Research Publishers".
Lavamisole, brand name Ergamisol costs approximately $10.00 for sheep. To fight reoccurance of colon cancer in humans, they have to spend $200.00 per month.
Prescription medications with exactly the same ingredients, identical standards in Canada, Mexico, Europe are half what they are in the US. Note. I only know about these areas. If anyone can tell me about other continents please do so.
The National Cancer Institute spent $30,000,000 in developing, proving Taxol works on various cancers. It than gave it to "Squibb to finish the testing. In other words the company saved much in research expenses. They still charge at least $6000.00 per year per patient.
Even more expensive is Ceredase for Gaucher's disease. It's close to half a million per year. There are probably many other examples, but I don't want to make this editorial too long.
I will end with this quote from the medical journal "Biological Psychiatry" "The overall influence of the healthcare industry is to emphasize drug treatment at the expense of other modalities. ...It focuses attention on disorders that are treatable by drugs and may promote over-diagnosis. It reinforces the practice of dealing with disease by treatment of symptoms and diverts interest from prevention." Authors J. Wortis, A. Stone"The addiction to drug companies" Biol. Psychiatry 32:847=9,1992. In other words emphasis on expensive drugs.
Bottom line. The US Government needs to step in and do something about the cruel, unfair, unreasonable prescription drug prices.
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Contributor's Note
Its unfair to be forced to choose between food and Rxs
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