I get a bit annoyed when I hear people talk about how there’s too much government regulation and how it stifles business or stops innovation in the free market. This week seems to give a voice to my annoyance.
Here’s the story over at WebMD.
At a time when the administration seems almost maniacally pro-business, we have yet another cautionary tale about decreased regulation and its long term effects. While the reach of the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) and the clean air act is throttled from action, while the accounting oversight reach of the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) failed to stop Enron, and while the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) seems to think that less competition is good in the formation of a free press and media, we have a major breakdown in the drug approval and review process.
The FDA’s (Food and Drug Administration’s) streamlined drug approval process seems to have a few billionaire-helping holes in it under current guidelines.
It seems that drug manufacturers can produce a new drug, present the limited initial trials to the agency as proof of effectiveness and then sit on subsequent follow-up trials with less than stellar results for almost 2 years while doctors write prescriptions based on a drug profile that isn’t true.
Only when a U.S. Congressional investigation is started do the two companies (Merck and Schering-Plough) pony up the report that seems to say that their combined drug Vitorin doesn’t seem to work any better than the generic single Statin drug Simvastatin (brand name Zocor). They combined two drugs (Zetia and Simvastatin) that were available as generics and cutting into their profits and by combining the two, produced a new patent that they could release as a new cholesterol drug with exclusive pricing and seemingly better benefits.
One report says that since the FDA approval 2 years ago that as many as 80,000 prescriptions per week were written for this drug under the assumption that the patient would receive greater benefit to their health in exchange for the greater cost in price. Now we find out that they could have taken the generic statins for pennies on the dollar less and been just fine. Since many of these patients are on Medicare, these two companies may have defrauded the American public or the patients themselves out of billions of dollars in money for meds they need regularly.
Want to know the kicker? Carrie Smith Cox, Schering-Plough’s president, made $28 million in stock sales (900,000 shares) just before the unfavorable results were released. This according to a report from CBS News. I hold little hope that there will be any real reaction to this from our representatives in Congress. Both companies pay a lot of money to make friends among both Democrats and Republicans.
There is an election coming up folks. I don’t get political beyond expressing distaste for certain decisions from time to time, but don’t mistake that for complacency. One of the biggest mistakes you can make is to assume that your vote doesn’t count. I don’t care if you vote for the same people that I do, as long as you take the time to participate in the decision.
We are at one of those points in time where we get to determine the direction of our government for the next few years. Get registered to vote, find out how to send in an absentee ballot if you think you’ll have to work, and HAVE YOUR SAY!
Jamie, the Podmedic
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