As we all know now from the frequent Diaries of Health Care Experts here, and a recent diary on Stem Cell Research, Big Pharma is not interested in a curing chronic disease. Containment is where the money. Containment until it gets out of control and you die.
Containment means charging $100,000 a year for a Cancer treatment that may add a few years of life under some pretty miserable conditions as it sucks the life out of the family's finances who try with low a degree of success to pay for the portions that Insurance companies won't cover.
This has been covered in many diaries and I've read most of them. I'm no expert in the field, but since I am in tech, I did take an interest in the Newsweek article today about Andrew Grove , former CEO of Intel . Say what you want about Intel, most of you are using computers with Intel chips. One has to wonder how far along we would be without the drive that Intel had to put mainframe processing power on the desktop. Then one has to consider, what if Big Pharma had the same drive to find cures.
Andrew Grove wants to get a conversation going on this. I think he'll be straight ahead when he finds out what we already know. There appears to be a tacit agreement in charging sky high prices for drugs that don't do much and spend the real money on advertising the potential for a world record hard-on to guys like me who are long past that stage and are more concerned with what the Doc is gonna say at the next physical.
Here's a few key excerpts from the Newsweek article:
During the time Andrew S. Grove spent at Intel, the computer chip company he co-founded, the number of transistors on a chip went from about 1,000 to almost 10 billion. Over that same period, the standard treatment for Parkinson's disease went from L-dopa to . . . L-dopa.
Grove (who beat prostate cancer 12 years ago and now suffers from Parkinson's) thinks there is something deeply wrong with this picture, and he is letting the pharmaceutical industry, the National Institutes of Health and academic biomedicine have it. Like an increasing number of critics who are fed up with biomedical research that lets paralyzed rats (but not people) walk again, that cures mouse (but not human) cancer and that lifts the fog of the rodent version of Alzheimer's but not people's, he is taking aim at what more and more critics see as a broken system.
One has to consider which viewpoint you are looking at the system before you call it broken. From a patients prospective who got lucky and lived many more years as a result of a drug treatment and who could afford it. Everything is just fine. But for the rest of us, I would say "corrupt" is better description of the system because of the greed that drives it.
But Andrew Grove who is wealthy and gets the best doesn't quite get the picture, so he here is what he is going to do :
On Sunday afternoon, Grove is unleashing a scathing critique of the nation's biomedical establishment. In a speech at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, he challenges big pharma companies, many of which haven't had an important new compound approved in ages, and academic researchers who are content with getting NIH grants and publishing research papers with little regard to whether their work leads to something that can alleviate disease, to change their ways.
This is good. He may not understand what drives the drug execs but what this indicates to me is; as Boomers start to feel their mortality more and more powerful people will start standing up to these companies. An Eli Lilly can be had for a mere 60 Billion these days. Who is to say that a band of hedge fund owners won't buy the stock and start pushing for cures instead of containment. Putting pressure on the CEOs to price their drugs properly and to deliver something of value like a cure instead of a overpriced drug that drives people into bankruptcy.
It's not the full answer to what people are focused on here; Single payer Health Care. But it's a huge cost that has to be paid even if we go to a single payer. If these guys won't produce cures, then it's good to see some in the private sector wake up to their BS and start pushing them in that direction.
Read the rest here