A Doctor Puts the Drug Industry Under a Microscope
by CLAUDIA DREIFUS
Published: September 14, 2004
WASHINGTON - In many ways, Dr. Marcia Angell is an unlikely muckraker. A pathologist by training, she is the former editor in chief of The New England Journal of Medicine. She is also a senior lecturer at Harvard Medical School.
But just days short of her 65th birthday and her first Social Security check, Dr. Angell is taking on the American pharmaceutical industry with a new book, "The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It" (Random House)."I don't worry about labels," Dr. Angell said in an interview at the Hotel Monaco, where she stopped during a book tour.
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Q. The first phase - the discount card phase - of the new Medicare drug benefit is about to go into effect. Do you, as a newly minted senior, believe it will make prescription drugs more affordable?
A. It's not going to have a major effect. These discounts are very small, maybe 10 to 15 percent. At the rate of inflation of drug prices, they'll be overtaken in a very short time.
Now, the main Medicare drug benefit that goes into effect in 2006 is designed to funnel billions of dollars to the pharmaceutical industry. It's an absolute bonanza for it. The pharmaceutical industry's lobbyists made certain that the legislation contained a provision barring Medicare from negotiating drug prices.
Interestingly, the federal government negotiates drug prices for the Veterans Affairs system and gets very low prices because it is a bulk purchaser. And Medicare would have been the biggest bulk purchaser of all - so it could have negotiated very low prices. That provision allows the drug companies to continue raising their prices faster than the inflation rate, and the drug benefit will soon become unaffordable.
nytimes.com
A bona fide expert shoots a major hole in the ONLY thing Bush has done in the way of health care. Bush's idea of a health care plan is to enrich the drug companies. |
