can't look any worse, Ricky Santorum proves that he's an even bigger asshole than we thought.
One of the feistiest exchanges came in response to a young child's question on the cost of medical care in America. Urged on by his mother, a boy asked what Santorum would do to lower medical costs, but before he could finish his question, the candidate said such things should be left up to the market.
"We can make medicine cheaper by using markets," Santorum said. "That's how you make medicine cheaper is that you have free people going out there and competing against each other and competition drives up quality and drives down costs."
Competition? Okay, great! So we can import cheaper drugs from Canada then, have them compete in the open market?
"The only reason new drugs are developed is because Americans actually do pay for the cost of that research," Santorum said. "And so when you say oh, I'll go and get my drugs in Canada, that's great. Go get your drugs in Canada and if everybody did that, you'd have no new drugs. You have that drug and maybe you're alive today because people have a profit motive to make that drug."
Okay, so forget the open market. Really, only people who can afford to deliver profits to drug companies should be able to use them, huh?
"People have no problem going out and buying an iPad for $900," he said. "But paying $900 for a drug, they have a problem with it. It keeps you alive. Why? Because you have been conditioned to thinking that health care is something that you should get and not have to pay for. Drug companies, health care companies need to have a profit motive, because if they don't, then how are we going to regulate costs? We are gonna ration care."
iPads start at $500, by the way. And unlike life saving drugs, you buy it once. If you had to pay $900 for an iPad every month, or even every year, you better believe sales would crater.
And while iPads are a completely optional purchase, life-saving drugs are not. Unless, of course, you can't afford to deliver profits.
The mother of the original questioner tried once more to plead her case, explaining that she's paid $1.3 million a year to keep her son alive, and while she's willing to go bankrupt for her child, it pains her to see his friends die in the hospital because their parents cannot afford the treatment.
Finding himself in the unenviable position of defending oft-derided drug companies, Santorum stuck to his guns.
"He's alive today because drug companies thought that they would make money in providing that care and if the drug company didn't think they could make any money by providing that care, I hate to put it in these terms, but that drug wouldn't be here," he said, adding that he sympathized with the mother, "we either believe in markets or we don't."
And oh, he's totally in favor of allowing insurance companies to discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions, so if you're already sick, he doesn't want you to get health insurance.
So you got it? If you can afford $1.3 million every year to deliver profits to big pharma and the insurance industry, then your kid can live. If you can't, then your kid dies, and that's okay, because if it's not, then you don't believe in free markets. Unless you're Canadian. Because if you are, then your kid gets to live.
USA! USA! USA!
Why are Britain's health charities bent on sucking the blood from the NHS? The very same organisations that do such sterling work funding research, supporting patients and promoting awareness appear to have a blind spot when it comes to assessing what treatments are worth. We see it each time the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice) reaches an unpopular decision to ban a drug on the NHS because it is too expensive, as it did yesterday with the new prostate cancer medicine abiraterone. Cue uproar from charities.
"This decision is a bitter blow to thousands of men and their families and must be overturned," said Owen Sharp, the chief executive of the Prostate Cancer Charity. It was the same last month, when Nice ruled against three bowel cancer drugs. Mark Flannagan, the chief excecutive of Beating Bowel Cancer, said: "This is yet another blow for bowel cancer patients. All bowel cancer patients deserve the best care." Of course – how could anyone dispute that? Nice agreed that some of the drugs were effective – extending life by an average of 3.9 months in the case of prostate cancer. As Mr Sharp said, that could give a terminally ill man the chance to "walk his daughter down the aisle or see the birth of a grandchild". It is a disaster for such a man to be denied such a drug.
But we cannot provide every treatment that is effective to every patient who would benefit without regard to the cost. If we did, we would quickly bankrupt the NHS. Yet that is what the health charities are helping to do. By turning their fire on Nice, and neglecting the other player in the tragedy – the drug company involved – charities are effectively saying that protecting drug-company profits is more important than protecting the NHS.
Nice assesses each drug and calculates how much benefit it delivers for the cost. It mostly approves drugs costing up to ?30,000 per Quality Adjusted Life Year (Qaly – a measure of the benefit), or for terminal conditions, up to ?50,000. In this case, the prostate drug came in at ?63,000 per Qaly, and the bowel cancer drugs at ?110,000 per Qaly. So, in Nice's view, the drug companies Janssen and Amgen were charging more than they were worth. Did the health charities challenge the companies? No. Instead, they lambasted Nice. Do they receive drug company financial support? Perhaps we should be told.
Only Harpal Kumar, the chief executive of Cancer Research UK, struck the right note. Commenting on the prostate drug decision yesterday, he said: "We feel extremely let down that the drug's manufacturer couldn't offer Nice a price they could agree on." This is a ?500bn global industry and it is time other organistations joined Nice in holding it to account to ensure fair prices are charged to the NHS.
By Phil Serafino
Feb. 2 (Bloomberg) -- A Johnson & Johnson prostate-cancer medicine discovered in England and developed with funds from U.K. charities is too expensive for the country’s National Health Service.
The NHS shouldn’t pay for Zytiga because the drug’s benefits don’t justify the cost even after the manufacturer agreed to cut the price, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence said in a statement today. The agency, known as NICE, advises the state-run medical system on which treatments it should pay for. J&J and the public have a chance to comment on the decision, which is preliminary, NICE said.
Advocates for cancer patients criticized the ruling, saying the drug helps keep men alive after chemotherapy has failed to stop their cancer. Zytiga, which costs 2,930 pounds ($4,640) for a 30-day supply, may extend life by more than three months compared with a placebo, and can be taken orally at home, London-based NICE said. The agency isn’t disclosing the discount that New Brunswick, New Jersey-based J&J agreed to provide.
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