Cherry Picked excerpt from yet another 'follow the money' story:
[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.
[National Review] Disclosure of embarrassing information should not be confused with disinformation.
There is a word missing from the non-classified report issued Friday, in which three intelligence agencies assess "Russia’s Influence Campaign Targeting the 2016 US Presidential Election." The FBI, CIA, and NSA elide any mention of . . . "Podesta."
Seems like a pretty significant omission -- not just because of how the 2016 campaign played out but also in light of the intelligence community’s recent history of politicizing its analyses. The report is replete with references to Russian "cyber espionage," "covert intelligence," "false-flag," "propaganda," and "influence" operations by which Vladimir Putin is alleged to have tried to put his thumb on the electoral scale.
Very sinister stuff, to be sure. But when the public hears these terms, it thinks of spies, misdirection, disinformation campaigns -- i.e., schemes intended to deceive the target audience. People don’t instantly think, "Oh, you mean an effort to publicize true but embarrassing information"; they don’t read "covert operation" and say to themselves, "That must mean they subjected only one side of a political contest to a high level of scrutiny."
That’s the kind of behavior people associate with the American media, not the Kremlin. The three intelligence agencies’ report pointedly declines to tell us what specific information gives them such "high confidence" that they know the operation of Vladimir Putin’s mind. They plead that the nature of their work does not allow for that: To tell us how they know what they purport to know would compromise intelligence methods and sources.
The report concludes that while Putin appears to have been rooting for Trump, the Russians assumed [like many of us] Clinton was going to win and were mainly trying to undermine the effectiveness of her anticipated presidency, not swing the election to Trump.
Emphasis added.
#6
No mention of Podesta's password which was "PASSWORD." No mention of all the shenanigans of Hillary with her home brew server? I started tuning out much of this as so much political noise at some point--particularly when no one really seemed very concerned about all the intelligence and pay-for-play transgressions of Hillary and Bill. It seemed like a case of "No need to look here, look over there "Unhingement Syndrome." When the MSM, the politicians and many of the Obama appointees to the intelligence agencies are all lined up pointing fingers at Russia, I begin to get suspicious--particularly in the absence of any proof that anyone can cite. I suspect that many in the outgoing government are connected in some way to the Clinton Foundation and that many are just trying to shush it up. Write it off to JohnQC's paranoia if you like, but much of this smells odiferous to me.
#8
First off, National Review, from its actions during the election year can... well, Raj can fill that in.
Second, judging by my research, it's likely that the Russian government or its authorized agents did whatever the IC said it did, for whatever reason it did.
Lastly, it's also interesting that the same USG non-IC entities and, more importantly, the media are not discussing the validity of any of the purloined information presented. Funny how that was done on the Wikileaks' Iraq or Snowden releases.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
