Patients Screwed Again by Big Pharma

There’s an interesting item in the latest AARP Bulletin about the huge pharmaceutical company, Pfizer, and its efforts to prevent the loss of mega-billions in revenue from the sale of their popular anti-cholesterol drug, Lipitor.


Pfizer’s patent on Lipitor has expired, you see, which means that there is now a much cheaper generic version available on the market, called atorvastatin.

But the moguls at Pfizer are not giving up. In fact, they have made deals with many of the health insurance companies, getting them to agree that their prescription drug plans will continue to pay for lipitor, but will NOT pay for atorvastatin.

Now, would one of you conservatives out there tell me again why we don’t need health care reform? Why we shouldn’t have a consumer watchdog? Why we don’t need to regulate these companies?

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The debate – if we can call it that – goes on. And on.

I continue to be astonished at the fabrications being spread about health care reform … spread by people who clearly know that what they are saying is not true. Ohio Republican John Boehner, for example, says the Democratic plan would amount to a government take-over of our health care system.

That’s poppycock and Boehner knows it! I see whichever private doctor I want … I get a blood test whenever my doctor recommends it … I have routine procedures whenever he and I decide they should be done. The only involvement by Medicare is to pay the damn bills!

But the Republicans keep howling that we don’t want to drive the insurance and pharmaceutical companies out of business.

You mean insurance companies like the Aetna, whose CEO gets $25 million a year in compensation?

Or pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer, which has just agreed to pay a $2.3 billion fine -- yes, that's billion with a B -- for illegally promoting some of their nostrums?

Doesn’t it occur to any of those Republicans that if a drug company can afford to pay a several billion dollar fine, they’re making too damn much money? These are the people they're blathering about?

Will said it best: "… it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

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