Stossel on health care

Tomorrow night, Stossel on Fox Business will be featuring a segment on the nanny state's intrusion into medical decisions that ought to be between an individual and his doctor. Here's a teaser link.

President's plan closes down on innovation, violates rights

That's what this article from Medical Marketing & Media should have been titled (its given title is "President's plan closes doughnut hole, bans 'pay for delay'")

What does Obama think piling huge fees on pharmaceutical companies and medical device manufacturers is going to do? It's going to kill innovation and drive up the price of health care...duh?

Remember that Nails song...

..."Head Like a Hole"?

Specifically, as I read this excellent Wall Street Journal op-ed, I thought of the lines, "Bow down before the one you serve. You're going to get what you deserve."

Big Pharma bowed down to the government, hoping that by playing nice with the bullies, they would get huge profits out of a sweeping healthcare bill that would force more Americans to carry insurance, thus turning more Americans into consumers of medications. Now that ObamaCare is in a shambles, Democrats look likely to turn to the strategy of passing multiple smaller, less controversial bills so they can still say they "did something" about health care.

So now, Big Pharma might just get what it deserves for having worked with Congress instead of proudly standing against it...because you know what's less controversial than a giant bill that involves lots of new taxes and requirements that affect Everyman? Smaller proposals like putting price controls on Medicare-purchased drugs, allowing reimportation of prescription drugs from countries whose governments control drug prices, and cutting into drug companies' patent exclusivity on biologics.

The pharmaceutical industry can't protest that such measures would be a violation of their rights to charge what they please for their medicines without direct intervention from the American government or indirect intervention from a foreign one (which is what reimportation is). They gave up any pretense of caring about rights when they tried to help Congress hog-tie insurance companies to get a share of the loot.

As the author of the op-ed says, "There's a lesson here for corporate America. Try standing up for the free markets and limited government that have always been the foundation of U.S. business."

We know better. We're the government.

Florida dermatologist Dr. Leslie Baumann, who was the lead investigator on clinical trials of Dysport, an antiwrinkle treatment that was approved by the FDA last April, has received a warning from that agency for remarks she made to the media about the drug before it was approved. Pharmaceutical companies are not permitted to promote the use of a drug before the FDA approves it (and they are not allowed to promote it for uses other than those approved by the FDA, even after approval is obtained), and that includes the doctors who run their trials, even if those doctors aren't directly employed by the drug company.

Does anyone else notice how ASININE that is?

Who in hell would know more about how good a drug is than the chief investigator of the clinical trial? Dr. Baumann has direct experience with the drug, which is more than any government paper-pusher can say.

The New York Times paraphrases Thomas W. Abrams, head of DDMAC (the division of the FDA that monitors drug advertising and marketing):

But an investigator should not promote any unapproved prescription drug — or an unapproved use of an already approved drug — as being safe or effective if the agency has not yet deemed it to be so, he said.

Right. Because the opinion of someone who has seen firsthand what the drug can do doesn't count, but the opinion of bureaucrats who have never worked with the drug does.

The Supreme Court may have given us a victory for freedom of speech last month, but let's not forget how the muzzle on talking about drugs is getting tighter and tighter. Doctors and pharmaceutical companies have just as much right to speak freely about drugs as unions and corporations have to speak about politics.