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POPS Drug Makers Raise Prices in Face of Health Care Reform The drug companies “can charge what they want — it’s not fair,” Eric White, the 42-year-old owner of a small jewelry store in Queens, said as he left a pharmacy recently. He shook his head. “What can I do?” he said. “I need my medicines.” Catherine J. Arnold, a drug industry analyst at Credit Suisse, said her latest study of the nation’s eight biggest pharmaceutical companies showed markedly similar results: list prices rising an average of 8.7 percent in the 12 months ending Sept. 30 — the highest rate of growth since at least 2004. Unscrupulous vultures! I would be outraged if I were an American. Heck, I'm outraged anyway. What a sad and sorry state of affairs. :(
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POPSBarbara Ehrenreich: The Swine Flu Vaccine Screw-up More: According to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, the government was misled by these companies, which failed to report manufacturing delays as they arose. Her department, she says, was "relying on the manufacturers to give us their numbers, and as soon as we got numbers we put them out to the public. It does appear now that those numbers were overly rosy." If, in fact, there's a political parable here, it's about Big Government's sweetly trusting reliance on Big Business to safeguard the public health: Let the private insurance companies manage health financing; let profit-making hospital chains deliver health care; let Big Pharma provide safe and affordable medications. As it happens, though, all these entities have a priority that regularly overrides the public's health, and that is, of course, profit…
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POPSShould We Trust The Experts? "None of this suggests the public should abandon a healthy skepticism toward even well-credentialed authorities. Pharmaceutical companies, with colossal missteps like the dangerous medication Vioxx, have earned suspicions about their motivations. Vaccinations foregone put not only those individual children at risk but clear the path for infectious disease to spread more easily. That's not a great outcome, whether we're collectively battling the measles or this season's H1N1 flu. "You can't minimize your individual risk," Wallace writes, "unless your herd, your friends and neighbors, also buy in." Our children most certainly deserve safe vaccines; that's a given. I don't blame people for not trusting special interest groups. I just thought this article brought out some interesting points regarding social media.
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POPSThe ‘Costs’ of Medical Care by Thomas Sowell NRO
countries where the medical training may not be the best. In short, reducing doctors’ income is not reducing the cost of medical care, it is refusing to pay those costs. Like other ways of refusing to pay costs, it has consequences. Any one of us can reduce medical costs by refusing to pay them. In our own lives, we recognize the consequences. But when someone with a gift for rhetoric tells us that the government can reduce the costs without consequences, we are ready to believe in such political miracles. There are some ways in which the real costs of medical care can be reduced, but the people who are leading the charge for a government takeover of medical care are not the least bit interested in actually reducing those costs, as distinguished from shifting the costs around or just refusing to pay them. The high costs of “defensive medicine” " expensive tests, medications, and procedures required to protect doctors and hospitals from ruinous lawsuits, rather than
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POPSH1N1 Vaccine The "science" behind vaccination is garbage. The consequences of getting it wrong are catastrophic. The people pushing this the hardest are the same criminals who brought you the Iraq War and the meltdown of the US economy through financial fraud. Just say "no" to being railroaded into allowing a dodgy set of chemicals, metals, and live viruses injected into your blood stream by venal idiots who have so little confidence in what they're doing they won't participate without getting total legal immunity in advance. If you or a loved one are crippled by this vaccine, you will shoulder the burden yourself. The pharmaceutical companies and the government have exempted themselves from all liability.
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POPSWhy does Joe Lieberman oppose healthcare reform? Ask his wife
But her stint at Hill & Knowlton was merely one episode in a professional lifetime devoted to the corporate health sector. For most of the past three decades, Hadassah Lieberman has been employed by either pharmaceutical companies or the lobbying firms that represent them -- starting with nearly a decade in the "public affairs department" at Hoffman-LaRoche from 1972-81, followed by stints at Pfizer, where she spent four years as "director of policy, planning and communications," and APCO Associates, a major lobbying firm where she served as a "senior associate" in its large healthcare division before retiring in 1998. She went back to work when she joined H&K, an outfit that became notorious for its billion-dollar defense of the tobacco industry. Not long after her contract began, Sen. Lieberman introduced legislation vastly extending patent protection for pharmaceutical companies -- notably including GlaxoSmithKline, a top client of his wife's firm.
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POPSPharmaceutical Industry Callbox is a b2b lead generation company that provides business to business sales leads and appointment setting services. Callbox provides telemarketing leads such as IT sales leads, janitorial leads, financial leads, accounting leads, medical leads, software leads and marketing leads.
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POPSTop Researcher On Cervical Cancer Vaccine Warns About Its Dangers So why do cervical cancer vaccines continue to be pushed by doctors and health authorities across the US, UK and other first-world nations? Because Big Pharma is the great corporate puppeteer that's pulling the strings of legislators. With enough money and lobbyists, you can always overcome scientific thinking with fear-based marketing and under-the-table deal-making. Science-based medicine has no place in a world where disease is big business. There's a ridiculous amount of money to be made by pushing vaccines onto people who don't need them. If I had ten bucks for every teenage girl that's been injected with a cervical cancer vaccine, I'd be... well... GlaxoSmithKline.
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POPSFreedom missing in government health laws I can see vaccinating foreigners against some diseases, but shoving a brand new vaccine, that doesn't even give real protection, is unreal. What the heck has happened to us America? Since when do people that are paid by pharmaceutical companies have enough power to force us to be their guinea pigs? Why don't we care about the girls murdered by this vaccine? Insanity at its finest
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POPSWilsonnnn! Who foots the bill for Mr. Wilsons' (and family) healthcare? Anyone know?
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POPSExposed: GOP Congressman Who Yelled "You Lie" at Obama Speech Received $240,000 from Health Care Ind It was not the first time Wilson — attorney, U.S. Army vet and former aide to U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond — has raised eyebrows by shouting at political opponents. Seven years ago this month, the then-freshman Wilson appeared on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” with five-term Congressman Bob Filner (D-Calif.) to discuss whether to go to war in Iraq, action that Filner opposed but Wilson supported. In the course of the discussion, Filner noted that the U.S. supplied weapons to Saddam Hussein’s regime during the Iran-Iraq War — a fact revealed by the investigation into the Iran-Contra Affair, which discovered the Reagan administration secretly sold weapons to Iran, then under an arms embargo, to win support for freeing U.S. hostages in Lebanon and to fund the Nicaraguan contras, a counterrevolutionary rebel force that was fighting the country’s government.
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POPSThe Real Issue: Who Should Control HealthCare? You Or Washington These areas are primarily marginal fixes to the current health care system and do not entail a major restructuring. Reforms where there may be common ground include: subsidizing low income American citizens and legal residents; requiring all Americans to have health care insurance; reform of medical malpractice tort system; permitting inter-state competition among health insurers; portability of insurance; and promoting healthy lifestyles. Obviously, the devil will be in the details of crafting these reforms. If the real issue of reform was to reduce the overall cost of medical care in America, the health care reform debate would center on medical malpractice tort law, promoting healthy lifestyles and dealing with the high end of life costs. Medical malpractice insurance and defensive medicine account for approximately 18 percent of health care costs. Obesity accounts for approximately 9 percent. Alcoholism and smoking account for another large percent.
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POPSAre HCG Diet Injections Safe for Weight Loss? HCG diet injections have come under scrutiny because they are not approved by the FDA for weight loss reasons, but that does not mean that they are not safe. HCG Diet and Exercise, HCG Diet, HCG Diet Program, HCG Diet Injections
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POPSHow Big Pharma pushed a more-expensive, no-more-effective drug
More: Lexapro had $2.3 billion in sales in 2008 even though generic versions of Celexa and every other drug in the class sell for a fraction of Lexapro’s price. For example, a month’s supply of 5-milligram tablets of Lexapro costs $87.99 at drugstore.com, compared to $14.99 for a month’s supply of a generic version of Prozac. Forest has recently been raising the price of Lexapro to make up for a decline in its use… It is impossible to unpack all of the reasons for these prescriptions, but some industry critics say one reason could be the money doctors make from Forest. Psychiatrists make more money from drug makers than any other medical specialty, according to analyses of payment data. And Forest gives more money and food to doctors than many of its far larger rivals… Forest’s payments to doctors in 2008 were surpassed only by those of Eli Lilly, Pfizer, Novartis and Merck — companies with annual sales that are five to 10 times larger than Forest’s.
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