Remove the pharma products. Remove the R&D efforts (whatever percentage spend you argue over, pharma does put the most money into medical science research).

And then where will we be.

Certainly not living to the age we are — with manageable conditions, with some killer diseases of old eradicated.

Mary Poppins said it simplest and best … “a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down”.

You’re living in cloud cuckoo land if you think ANY industry is 100% honest, 100% of the time … same goes for the medical community.

Pharma aren’t in this to make poisons folks … stop being nave about their legitimate right to make profits too. Come down from your ivory towers,

That’s true. But then there is a great deal about the industry that IS biased towards its interests. As such, it would be a surprise if CME provision wasn’t also, and if it is biased, then that is most definitely not in the interests of patient care.

Ultimately, if the industry wants to regain its lost credibility (and, yes, I think it’s lost all of it), then it should, perhaps, consider treating patients less like consumers, to be fought over for market share. There are alternatives (if only in my area of interest, psych drugs), to the Worshipful Company’s products, after all, and those products are looking increasingly like Betamax, to me. At the end of the day, one doesn’t need to convince the industry and its political adherents, in order to achieve change: one may just vote with one’s feet.

Matt

LOL. You’re clearly not a marketing man: after “Win-win,” any regular S&M guy would have said “let’s do squash”!

Anyway, the business model that pharma has developed has many issues that undermine the ultimate quality of the product that it markets. These are many, and well-documented. Influencing KOLs to say nice stuff appears to be one of the elements of this business model. Presumably, a similar methodology is used on frontline doctors (hence the furore over the way that reps operate). All these little things, together with a product with suppressed data on side effects, lead to a scenario where the precise opposite of what is being claimed: patients’ health being undermined by the drugs that they take.

On the other hand “the benefits outweigh the risks”. Except, as I discovered, one is not permitted to know what the benefits are, and the risks only become apparent on a piecemeal basis. Erm, what exactly is it that we’re taking, and taking on trust?

Matt

If we acknowledge that the nanny state is here to stay, then I think we need to acknowledge our cognitive dissonance here: a state (little state, like NY) taxes a product or behavior it doesn’t like ostensibly to decrease the use of said product, but it also relies heavily on those taxes in order to fund activities of the state. Also, wouldn’t it be better to make cigarettes illegal, if we despise the outcomes they bring with them?

And where does it stop? Today, cigarettes; tomorrow, McDonald’s? All of these taxes are heavily regressive, also. The indigent use much more of these products that the nanny state would tax. When do we decide that an everyday product (other than meds here) is harmful to the interests of the state and should be taxed? I just read that beta-carotene and vitamins A & E are associated with higher cardiovascular events. Are we going to tax vitamins and carrots? Where does it stop? That is the problem with the Mommy state. You can justify almost anything by saying it is “a good thing.”

As for convention spending, again you seem so focused on pharma marketing. Let’s scrutinize marketing of every industry, incuding the food industry. I am confused because you seem to want the benefits that a robust pharmaceutical industry provide, but you are critical of everything they do in order to market the products they develop.

I don’t really care about the “unrestricted educational grants.” Never really have. I’m worried about the money/gifts/grants that come with strings attached. I think that is true for most.

This list did not even include the convention sponsorships that Pfizer gave in the first quarter. I suppose those are a different line on the Marketing budget, and aren’t discretionary (I would guess)like the urestricted educational grants are. They are also many multiples higher than most of the the amounts on the list “disclosed.”

As for taxes on tobacco, and the “nanny” state, I take a pragmatic approach. So far, the “free market” - which by the way I would argue is a fiction in this country and the developed world - isn’t so good about front-loading the future costs incurred by an action today. What I value is fewer people with emphysema (and therefore eligibility for SSI disability), fewer lung cancer patients, less heart disease (which are costly for the nanny state Medicare program), and less asthma burden for children whose parents won’t stop smoking around them. Even without considering the financial costs (which our taxes pay for), the suffering of the people affected is hard to see. Optional taxes - like taxes on discretionary items (tobacco, potato chips, sodas, luxury cars, what have you) - seem like a good way to distribute the future burden. If it leads to a socially desirable change, is this a bad thing?

Without losing the point of my comments. Essentially 1/3 of the “unrestricted educational grant” money could have been justified as a marketing expense for the Chantix brand team.

Any tax accountants want to chime in on whether or not these “grants” are deductible if laundered through a non-profit?

Jane, I agree. It sure is pretty! I like how they give the exact amounts - no matter how small - also how all the listings are alphabetical, not in order of value.