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Fake Healthcare: Nancy Pelosi and the 'Big Pharma' Chocolate Factory
[Townhall] Buy-and-Raise: $200 Drugs for $8,000. Wall Street has a name for a dirty business practice that escalated under the Obama administration wherein drug companies charge the American taxpayers fake, or inflated, prices for decades-old drugs that should retail, at most, for $200. The term is "buy-and-raise." Drug companies got everything they wanted in Obamacare thanks to slick negotiation from big Pharma lobbyist Billy Tauzin. Obama, congressional Democrats and Tauzin collaborated to ram the unconstitutional bill through congress in 2010 without a single Republican vote. (I encourage you to learn the full story of "Pimp Daddy Tauzin" and Obamacare.) Unfortunately, drug companies gained at the price of patients. 300 doctors--whom I personally interviewed--say Obamacare will raise costs and lower the quality of healthcare for young Americans. Buy-and-raise, the Los Angeles Times reported last month, is a practice that drug companies are utilizing to inflate prices by 1,000%. Here’s how it works: drug companies offer patients "co-pay coupons" for common drugs like a simple skin cream called, Alcortin A and a basic pain reliever, Vimovo. The drugs retailed for $189 and $115 respectively less than two years ago. Today, they retail for $7,968 and $2,061 respectively. Patients and doctors rarely see the true sticker price as the drugs are covered by many insurance plans and drug companies give patients co-pay coupons that allow them to pay a negligible amount while, as the Los Angeles Times reports: "leaving America’s health system to pick up the rest of the price." Taxpayers like you are picking up a hefty price indeed. Researchers from UCLA, Harvard and Northwestern recently found that drug companies have been reimbursed "as much as $2.7 billion" more "over five years" than "if the coupons were not used," reports the Los Angeles Times. Profits from buy-and-raise tactics are padding the salaries of drug executives more often than saving patient lives. Horizon CEO Timothy Walbert’s compensation package increased by a factor of ten from 2014 to 2015 to $93.4 million. Drugs like Alcortin A and Vimovo cost drug companies little to make as they are based on ingredients discovered decades ago, but patients will not question five-figure costs that they never see. Posted by: Besoeker 2017-01-09 |
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