Drug Firms 'Gouge' Consumers After Taking Taxpayer Handouts

[rodeodance]

Drug Firms 'Gouge' Consumers After Taking Taxpayer Handouts
By Catherine Komp
The New Standard

Friday 14 April 2006

Thanks to huge government grants offered to pharma companies that turn around and make gigantic profits off the drugs they create, Americans are paying twice for many of the drugs on which they depend.

In response to a major pharmaceutical company's announcement of skyrocketing profits and its plans to expand the market for an expensive cancer treatment, patient- and consumer-rights advocates are demanding that the government step in and stop corporate "price gouging."

Consumers, such critics say, are paying twice - first, through federal grants to pharmaceutical companies to develop the drugs and again at the drug store.

On Tuesday, the global biotechnology company Genentech reported that the company's total product sales for the first quarter of 2006 increased 39 percent, to $1.64 billion, while sales of their colon-cancer drug Avastin increased 96 percent, raking in $398 million. The same day, Genentech also announced it was seeking approval from the Food and Drug Administration to expand use of Avastin to treat lung and breast cancer.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/041806P.shtml
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[Trillo]

1. Yeah, stop corporate price gouging, but never, never

stop corporate welfare. Taxpayer money subsidizes private wealth.

[Jayhawk Lib]

2. What a greedy bunch!!!!

We would all be better off if they would just go belly up and disappear. We do not need a bunch of greedy bastards like oil companies and big pharmaceuticals.

[Trillo]

4. HR 5015 may help

to stop some of the insiders' greed to profit upon the backs of taxpayers.

HR 5015 as PDF
To prohibit securities trading based on nonpublic information relating to Congress....

[Jayhawk Lib]

5. I just want to

run them out of business. They are greedy and we can get our drugs from foreign sources. They think that they have to have all of this money for development and more profits. They should be developing and manufacturing drugs just to help mankind.

[Trillo]

6. How does eliminating corporate welfare

or HR5015 relate to putting corporate out of business?

[lldu]

3. That was shrubs plan.....

Give billions of dollars. Bask in the glory of saying "I fixed drug benefit plans" , which he did. He FIXED it so that the pharma companies had a WIN/WIN. Get money at the beginning, then hike prices because it would be illegal for the government to ask them to lower them.Then stick them again when people had to buy drugs at the inflated prices.

[McCamy Taylor]

7. Rummie runs a drug company. These is one sector of the economy

that still gives big bucks to the GOP,because high oil prices and immigrant issues do not hurt them, and crazy GOP legislation helps them.

So, of course W. and Co. will be handing out favors as fast as they can hoping to fill the coffers that will be feeding them this election cycle.

Everyone here realizes that the Medicare RX Scam was designed to cut spending for the insurance companies that donate to the GOP (those Medigap policies were costing them plenty) while at the same time giving money to the drug manufacturers. That giveway was basically tax payer money straight into the GOP election coffers.