THE MEDICINE STORE

I spend about $800.00 to $ 1,OOO.00 on drugs a month. That is quite a habit and it is legal.

Within the last couple of years, it seems to me that my medications have truly

jumped in price. Perhaps, you spend more. Why could that be in terms of spending? Inflation? That there has been dramatic improvements in the medication that you are already taking.?Maybe.

Brill/TIME (2010)6/12: 31 indicates that money spent on lobbying for all activities in the legal realm has nearly tripled in the last 11 years. Further, bandit scientists crunch numbers in various ways to make a product look viable and attractive. So you buy a new and improved drug, and it costs more. What have the drug companies done? They compared their medication to a placebo or a

dummy drug that looks like a drug, but is made of powder and or sugar. Or they may have published results of a study that compares the drug to another and then stop

sampling when their drug is significantly better than the control drug. However, if they keep sampling, no significant difference is noted. Then comes the public relations folks who express their findings in a tricky way to suggest that the med is better than it really is. They did all that back in the days of tobacco industry controversy and continue to do so today All this is noted in THE ECONOMIST (2010) 6/29:86-87.

Bliss and Decker in” Ending the Silence of Generic Drug makers” BLOOMBERG-BUSINESS WEEK (2010)6/4 note that Big Drug Companies are now making backroom deals to generic drug companies to take the money and when the patent runs out, the generic company looks the other way. A generic, that cost a lot less is never manufactured and the big companies pile on the profits. Although this is

a controversial number, many feel that an additional profit of $3.5 billion dollars a year is made to keep the generics from making more expensive drugs

to lower their price.

So here you are. You need the medication, it has bought off the competition, and rented congressional sponsors. So what do you do? You pay more. The author now pays

$440 for one month’s supply of a brand name. Further, the author got 3 little bottles of

heart related meds for roughly $125.00 each. That was in just one package that I got from the pharmacists.

As a vast generalization, most other western democracies pay less. The time is right to send an e-mail or letter to all the folks that represent you. See what they say. My guess is that after the midterms, you will never hear about it again.