Drug Shortages are Leading to Price Gouging and Safety Issues

Drug Shortages are Leading to Price Gouging and Safety Issues

www.charlotteobserver.com

…the vast majority of hospitals nationwide are experiencing life-threatening shortages of medicines. …price gougers are selling scarce medicines at obscene prices. …a blood pressure medication that normally sells for $25.90 being offered for $1,200 - a 4,533 percent markup. Mark-ups have been as high as 3,980 percent for chemotherapy medicines to treat leukemia, and 3,170 percent for medicines to help cancer patients retain bone marrow.

These aren't rare examples. …

(visit the link for the full news article)

Got that? A 4,533% markup!

It looks awfully suspicious. The drugs in question are the generic ones for cancer, surgery, allergies, high blood pressure, pain and heart conditions. The kind of stuff that kills without treatment. And these drugs have been around so long they're off-patent.

Big Pharma doesn't want to make generic drugs - they're not as profitable as the ones still under patent protection. So surprise, surprise - generic drugs are getting hit with production delays and quality issues. There are shortages. And price gouging. And deaths.

Production delays and quality issues have led to nationwide shortfalls that could mean the difference between life and death.

The affected medications include chemotherapy drugs and treatments for allergies and hypertension. Also on the list are pain medication and drugs to treat heart conditions.

The Food and Drug Administration saw a record number of shortages in 2010, and there are more supply problems this year, particularly among generic sterile injectables. …

Contributing to the shortages are production delays and quality issues, … The FDA also said too few manufacturers are producing the older and widely used generic(s)…

…Many companies choose not to produce these products because they are not as profitable as other drugs and manufacturing them is complex…

Patients and hospitals alike are getting hit.

99.5% of Hospitals Report Drug Shortages

The Institute for Safe Medication Practices has called the recent rash of shortages “unprecedented.” …

The AHA says that 99.5% of the 820 community hospitals that responded to the group’s June survey reported experiencing at least one drug shortage in the past six months. A full 44% reported shortages of 21 or more different drugs.

All treatment categories were affected, hospitals said, with 80% or more respondents experiencing shortages of surgery/anesthesia, emergency care, cardiovascular, gastrointestinal/nutrition, pain or infectious disease drugs. And 66% of hospitals reported shortages of cancer drugs. Some 47% of hospitals reported experiencing a shortage of at least one drug on a daily basis.

It's a standard corporate win-win strategy. In this case, population reduction and control, plus mega- mega-bucks.

And it's the law:

Profits Before People.

www.charlotteobserver.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

reply to post by soficrow


Great information, S&F to the OP!

I believe we will continue to see the impact of corporate greed accelerating in our most basic needs - healthy food, water, air/environment, and critical services - and what can be more critical than medical care? Why we ever based such core human needs within a for-profit mindset is beyond me. I know their are many out there who believe the "free market" can solve everything if left alone. To them I would say there is one critical area that the free market has never in history solved - GREED.

So, what's it going to look like once the Obamacare is in full effect? Is this where the panels of medical decision makers come in? Will they be deciding who gets medicine?

I just can't think it would be any other way. Seriously.

This in not good news.

With millions of people worldwide depending on medication.

What better way is there to control you?

This stuff scares me more than any distant rock...

We're not having shortages. Must be a privatization thing. By the way, any country can force their pharmaceuticals to create the right meds with bills. Thats appropriate use of bills, protecting the public and guaranteeing good low cost or free services. And they ignore patents too.

It's not just generics.

Right now there is a massive shortage of brand name 100 mg. Dilantin, an anti-seizure drug.
The thing about Dilantin, versus phenytoin, the generic, is that patients cannot switch from one to the other without the potential for serious health concerns.
Also, switching from one anti-seizure drug to another is not often an option as switching is quite risky for patients on Dilantin long-term.
www.ashp.org...
www.pfizerpro.com...

Why would a drug company do this...play with the health and safety of consumers.

We should talk to the Mexican drug lords about diversifying into pharmaceutical meds. They have no problems with purity or supply with their products. Best advice, get by on as few drugs as possible and stock up on the ones you can't do with out. Even chinese bulk drugs are still available and come with COA of purity if you ask. Resist dependency on the system as it is how they will try and control you. Now to figure out how to extract insulin from a pig. Have the proper penicillin culture and can make the antibiotic in high purity. Squew these guys I have a Ochem degree and am working on making all my own meds or stockpiling enough safely to last the balance of my years.
seed

reply to post by Open2Truth

I believe we will continue to see the impact of corporate greed accelerating in our most basic needs - healthy food, water, air/environment, and critical services -

The impact's are already out of control. Why do you think so many are sick and getting sicker?

and what can be more critical than medical care?

Now that's a poser.

…Um. …Uncontaminated air, food and water to protect our health?

The global corporate strategy is to create the market (disease) AND the product (treatment).

…Seems to me we should just cut 'em off at the knees. Kind of a no-brainer.

Why we ever based such core human needs within a for-profit mindset is beyond me. I know their are many out there who believe the "free market" can solve everything if left alone. To them I would say there is one critical area that the free market has never in history solved - GREED.

Well, corporate law says "Profits before people." The environment and animals we use for food don't figure either.

…If we changed corporate law to safeguard peoples' health and the environment, then maybe we won't go extinct.

reply to post by SourGrapes

So, what's it going to look like once the Obamacare is in full effect?

Countries like Canada with healthcare contract manufacturing facilities for common drugs that are "medically necessary." …But they don't have any recourse when the corporations renege on their contracts, like they're doing now. …It's a major power play.

Is this where the panels of medical decision makers come in? Will they be deciding who gets medicine?

I just can't think it would be any other way. Seriously.

Oh yeah. Eugenics policies are definitely back, but now they're called "genetic" or "age-related" terms. Just check your insurance policy - you're not covered for anything real - according to the underwriters, everything that makes you sick is genetic or maybe, a "natural" consequence of aging. It's been going for a while.

All that's changed is now the global corporate government is arm wrestling with nations for full control.

reply to post by whyamIhere

Originally posted by whyamIhere
With millions of people worldwide depending on medication.

What better way is there to control you?

Standard tactic: make you sick; produce the treatment.

This stuff scares me more than any distant rock...

reply to post by Unity_99

Originally posted by Unity_99
We're not having shortages. Must be a privatization thing.

If by "we" you mean Canada, guess again. Major shortages, and getting bad.

List of drugs in short supply in Canada grows longer
Health Canada has added 16 more drugs to its list of …drugs in short supply across the country — including several drugs used for chemotherapy.

…the Canadian Pharmacists Association said the problem of drug shortages has been an ongoing issue for more than a year.

"It's become a definite concern for pharmacists and for patients," said Jeff Morrison, spokesman for the CPA.

At a January meeting with the health minister, the Canadian Pharmacists Association recommended Canada develop a nationwide monitoring system similar to one in the U.S. which keeps track of drugs on the shortage list.

At the moment there is no database in Canada which logs the extent of shortages, how long they will last and which drugs are affected, Morrison said.

By the way, any country can force their pharmaceuticals to create the right meds with bills.

Erm. No, they can't; they can only contract a supplier. And they can't do anything if the supplier reneges and doesn't fill the contract:

Health Canada has no way to punish or to prosecute drug manufacturers who fail to produce an agreed-upon quantity of drugs, said Morrison. "It's beyond their regulatory scope . . . so it's really a matter of bringing all the stakeholders within that drug supply chain to the table to figure it out," he said.

…So much for government-industry "partnerships."

Thats appropriate use of bills, protecting the public and guaranteeing good low cost or free services.

A fading dream?

…Looks like the solution is either forcing a truly major decontamination clean-up, so people can live healthy - OR - building government-run drug manufacturing facilities.

reply to post by DontTreadOnMe

Why would a drug company do this...play with the health and safety of consumers.

I dunno. ...Cuz they can? ...To make more money?

...Cuz sick people can't riot? And they're apathetic and passive?

I had to go to 6 different pharmacies to get my adderall . No one had it and say haven't received orders for a month. It's for Barr, the generic version .

reply to post by xstatic


Sorry.

...There IS a conspiracy here. The Global Corporate Government's corporate octopi control: the industries that create disease; the Big Pharmaceutical companies that manufacture the treatments (not cures); the insurance companies that cover corporate liability AND environmental health effects. Everything else too, but that's beside the point.

They've got the perfect win-win situation: no liability for creating disease; no medical coverage except to keep you working; when disease progresses to debilitation and disability (which it does and will), your coverage ends on the grounds that your disease is genetic or age-related, if not lifestyle-related and therefor a "personal liability."

NOTE: Many of these environmental diseases have effects that can be passed on - the inherited diseases are not really "genetic," just familial, but they are commonly described as "genetic."

The Global Corporate Government's goal is to keep the population working but dependent on treatment, and get rid of the "useless eaters" as soon as they succumb or become too costly to keep going.

...Current "drug shortages" are a power play - part of a strategy to implement full-bore Eugenics Policies. Also see wiki, Eugenics.

...American corporate philanthropies launched a national campaign of ethnic cleansing in the United States, helped found and fund the Nazi eugenics of Hitler, and then created the modern movement known as “human genetics.”

War Against the Weak. Trailer

War Against the Weak
In the first three decades of the 20th Century, American corporate philanthropy combined with prestigious academic fraud to create the pseudoscience eugenics that institutionalized race politics as national policy. The goal: create a superior, white, Nordic race and obliterate the viability of everyone else. How? By identifying so-called "defective" family trees and subjecting them to legislated segregation and sterilization programs. The victims: poor people, brown-haired white people, African Americans, immigrants, Indians, Eastern European Jews, the infirm and really anyone classified outside the superior genetic lines drawn up by American raceologists. The main culprits were the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harriman railroad fortune, in league with America's most respected scientists hailing from such prestigious universities as Harvard, Yale and Princeton, operating out of a complex at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island. The eugenic network worked in tandem with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the State Department and numerous state governmental bodies and legislatures throughout the country, and even the U.S. Supreme Court. ...

VIDEO

I had to go to 3 different pharmacies to get my Aderall. The pharmacist at one said there is a shortage....so it is very real.

reply to post by SourGrapes


I disagree - but what is going on now is that money is deciding who gets the medicine - and the care. And us regular folk are getting less and less of the green.

This concerns me greatly because my mother is currently in a hospital, in the ICU, and is extremely sick. What particularly concerns me is the bit in the article about "grey market" medicines. Due to the nature of my mother's condition she is on quite a few different medications, and there's no telling how good the quality of any of them is. I can say that it seems the pain medication she is on is not working as well as it should.

On a related note, earlier today(before I heard about any shortages) I was trying to purchase an OTC product, and went to 5 different pharmacies and couldn't find it anywhere. Finally a pharmacist told me the manufacturer was having a major shortage of the drug in question. So it seems shortages are affecting even the OTC market.

GUESS WHO controls big Pharma????

In the early half of the 20th century, petrochemical giants organized a coup on the medical research facilities, hospitals and universities. The Rockefeller family sponsored research and donated sums to universities and medical schools which had drug based research..... In 1939 a "Drug Trust" alliance was formed by the Rockefeller empire and the German chemical company IG Farben (Bayer). After World War Two, IG Farben was dismantled but later emerged as separate corporations within the alliance. Well known companies included General Mills, Kellogg, Nestle, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Procter and Gamble, Roche and Hoechst (Sanofi-Aventis).

The Rockefeller empire, in tandem with Chase Manhattan Bank (now JP Morgan Chase), owns over half of the pharmaceutical interests in the United States. It is the largest drug manufacturing combine in the world. Since WWII, the pharmaceutical industry has steadily netted increasing profits to become the world's second largest manufacturing industry;

The Rockefeller Foundation was originally set up in 1904 as the General Education Fund. The RF was later formed in 1910 and issued a charter in 1913 with the help of Rockefeller millions. Subsequently, the foundation placed it's own "nominees" in federal health agencies and set the stage for the "reeducation" of the public. A compilation of magazine advertising reveals that as far back as 1948, larger American drug companies spent a total sum of $1,104,224,374 for advertising. Of this sum, Rockefeller-Morgan interests (which went entirely to Rockefeller after Morgan's death) controlled about 80%. [5] See also AMA.

IG Farben & Auschwitz

Auschwitz was the largest mass extermination factory in human history. However, few people are aware that Auschwitz was a 100% subsidiary of IG Farben....

After WWII, IG Farben attempted to shake its abominable image through corporate restructuring and renaming. So great has been their success that the public has no idea that it many of the men responsible for such atrocities, were able to carry on their work even after the collapse of the Nazi regime. Namely, a medical paradigm that relies almost exclusively highly toxic drugs. Such men were in control of the large chemical and pharmaceutical companies, both well before and after Hitler. The Nuremberg Tribunal convicted 24 IG Farben board members and executives on the basis of mass murder, slavery and other crimes. Incredibly, most of them had been released by 1951 and continued to consult with German corporations. The Nuremberg Tribunal dissolved IG Farben into Bayer, Hoechst and BASF, each company 20 times as large as IG Farben in 1944. For almost three decades after WWII, BASF, Bayer and Hoechst (Aventis) filled their highest position, chairman of the board, with former members of the Nazi regime. Bayer has been sued by survivors of medical experiments...
www.sourcewatch.org...

I tried to get the eye ointment I keep on hand for my various critters and was not able to get it. In talking to the vet He told me they with drew it from the marked because of "Quality" concerns.

I think this is a BIG CLUE to what is actually happening.

Much of the drug manufacture shifted from the USA to China. However the quality control is just not there in China and I think that has come back to bite the manufacturers.

Look at all the recent scandals about drugs/FDA lately. THREAD