Re: A drug-company executive speaks out
From: George Conklin (georgeconklin1_at_earthlink.net)
Date: 12/31/04
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Date: Fri, 31 Dec 2004 00:50:30 GMT
"MrPepper11" <MrPepper11@go.com> wrote in message
news:1104414165.811399.294070@c13g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
> Houston Chronicle
> Dec. 29, 2004
>
> What big drug companies don't want you to find out
> Those least able pay the most for prescriptions
> By PETER ROST
>
> The U.S. health-care system is the best in the world. Or so we are
> often told. But is it really true?
>
> It is certainly the best system for drug companies, which can charge
> the highest prices in the world to some U.S. consumers. The
> Congressional Budget Office has estimated that average prices for
> patented drugs in 25 other top industrialized nations are 35 percent to
> 55 percent lower than in the United States.
>
> And it is a pretty good system for hospitals, insurance companies and
> others that deliver health-care services. Americans spend about twice
> as much per person for health care as do Canadians, Japanese or
> Europeans, according to the World Health Organization.
>
> But it's not a good system for American citizens. The United States has
> shorter life expectancies and higher infant and child mortality rates
> than Canada, Japan and all of Western Europe except Portugal, according
> to the WHO.
>
> I'm a drug-company executive who has spent 20 years marketing
> pharmaceuticals. And I'm troubled. I'm most troubled by the fact that
> we stick it to the people who can afford it the least.
>
> For instance, elderly people who use a Medicare discount card and have
> to pay $1,299 annually for a drug that the Department of Veterans
> Affairs purchases for $322, according to a comparison by Families USA.
> Or middle-class families that lose health insurance and have to pay
> $29,500 for an overnight hospital stay, when Medicaid would have paid
> only $6,000, according to The Wall Street Journal.
>
> It just doesn't make any sense. And, not surprisingly, the companies
> with the biggest profits - those in the drug industry - have been
> fighting hardest to maintain the status quo.
>
> Our dirty little secret is that the drug industry already sells its
> products, right here in the United States, at the same low prices
> charged in Canada and Europe. It's done through rebates. These are
> given to those with enough power to negotiate drug prices, such as the
> VA.
>
> A 2001 study by the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen found that
> drug companies' favorite customers paid just a little over half the
> retail price. This leaves the 67 million Americans without insurance to
> pay cash, with no rebates, at double the prices paid by the
> most-favored customers.
>
> The fight against reimportation of drugs is a fight to continue to
> charge our uninsureds full price while giving everyone else a rebate.
>
> But what about all those programs drug companies provide to help the
> indigent pay for drugs? If they really worked, the Kaiser Family
> Foundation wouldn't have reported that 15 percent of uninsured children
> and 28 percent of uninsured adults had gone without prescription
> medication in 2000 because of cost, and 87 percent of uninsured
> individuals with serious health problems reported trouble obtaining
> medication.
>
> People today have to choose between drugs and food. The journal
> Diabetes Care recently reported on a study of older adults with
> diabetes. One in three said they went without food to pay for drugs.
>
> As a drug-company executive, I care about profits. When I was
> responsible for a region in Northern Europe, I doubled sales in two
> years by lowering drug prices, and in the process increased my
> company's sales ranking in Sweden from No. 19 to No. 7 in less than two
> years. I proved that it is possible to do good business with lower
> prices.
>
> It's encouraging to see that the American Medical Association recently
> came out in favor of a system that would allow U.S. pharmacies and
> wholesalers to reimport drugs safely from other countries. This is
> exactly what Europe has had for more than 20 years.
>
> It is outrageous to claim, as politicians and drug companies have done,
> that the United States wouldn't be able to safely and cost-effectively
> handle reimportation. A key trade association for European
> pharmaceutical companies claims there has never been a confirmed case
> in Europe of a counterfeit medication reaching a patient as a result of
> reimportation. In Germany, this was verified last year by the Federal
> Ministry of Health.
>
> In the next five years, branded drugs with annual sales of $72.9
> billion are expected to lose patent protection. So we in the drug
> industry are fighting reimportation because we're worried about the
> bottom line. But when we have to choose between that and the lives of
> those who can't afford drugs, we have to choose life.
>
> I joined this industry to save lives, not to take them. And that's the
> reason I've chosen to speak out.
>
> ....
>
> Rost is a vice president of marketing at Pfizer; the views expressed
> here are his own, not those of his employer.
>
Is Rost looking for a new job?
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