pffffffffffffffffffff……

And people have the gall to call me a conspiracy theorist? …
Hilarious..

Just don’t take that extra step into conspiracy theory-land. It could be that the majority of medicaid recipients are women: Does that prove to you an underlying misogynistic bias in the health-care system? In a given town, maybe most medicaid recipients have a stutter. Does that mean the system discriminates against stutterers?

Final note: As for Vioxx, it’s really too bad they didn’t have you in the room when the recall decision was made. When the investigators presented to the corporate executives, some board members, the heads of the musculo-skeletal franchise as well as the Nobel-calibre scientists from the research labs, you could have been there to correct their grade 11 math.

Take the records of a doctor for a single condition. What would you think if his private pay patients got brand medication, and his Medicaid patients got generics, and there were differences in the outcomes and in the rates of adverse effects? Is that cool with you?

BTW - if there are racial disparaties, as you claim (and I would tend to believe it), it’s because the “dark-skinned people” you refer to are poor and Medicaid drives cost containment. And not because they are dark-skinned. You can’t reason from the effect back to the cause.

It is doubtful that racism is the underlying issue. Poverty is. And the reason why a disproportionate number of “dark-skinned people” are poor in the US is the root cause, and is not (I seriously doubt) the result of some racist conspiracy within the health care system. The system discriminates against the poor, plain & simple. And the underlying reasons (I mentioned earlier) are economic.

But something tells me you won’t be open to this kind of rational argument… Regardless, peace and health to you and your family.

Take old people off aspirin and cardiac events increase. There were no deaths in the trial.

The other mystery easily solved?

The difference between the rates of cardiac complaints in Vioxx and placebo is not clinically meaningful. It is statistically significant only until a correction is made for the effect of the large sample size. The president of Merck did not have 11th grade statistics.

Lastly, this may have been a ruse to promote, son of Vioxx. If it was, the president should go to jail for what he did to the stock price, and the disruption of good care of millions of people on Vioxx.

I do not believe your comments are worth commenting on, save one:

There is statistically-significant evidence that Vioxx, as a selective COX-2 inhibitor, does in fact act negatively upon some as-yet-unknown mechanism that is cardio-protective.

It is likely, but undemonstrated in a clinical setting, that this is a class effect of all NSAIDs. The fact that the effect only shows up over the longer-term (e.g., 18mos) is key. If you took most other NSAIDs that long (like Advil), you would have already died from the GI bleeding before attaining a higher risk of cardiac events.

That’s the truth, regardless of the source of one’s advertising revenue. You may be right about people’s motivations here (I really don’t know); but if you know enough, you can see through whatever propaganda comes your way.

There are serious health racial disparities. This is a potential cause.

So is bringing awareness to corruption, fraud, patient harm and conflict of interest in the pharmaceutical industry purely in the interest of “left wing” ideals? I would have thought safe drugs, effective medications and an ethical healthcare-pharmaceutical industry was in everyones interest regardless of their political leanings?..

I must have been mistaken..

The real aim of this blog, of government attacks on drug companies, of media and left wing ideologue bashing of drug companies?

Racism.

They do not want dark skinned Medicaid patients to receive brand name medication. No dispute if dark people get generics unfit for animals. No dispute about white people getting brand medication.

Grassley is supported financially by health insurance groups. Ed will not provide the ad revenue of the newspaper owner of this blog from health insurance company ads. I bet his ad department has, at the click of a mouse, all data down to the penny, and to the minute. Nor do we know the funding sources of the alleged victims repeatedly commenting here, in support of Ed’s biased propaganda.

(1) Pharmaceuticals (and other core health services) are considered by the public to be a right, not a privilege. However, in economic terms, they behave more like luxury goods: Ever increasing quality gains can command ever-increasing prices, and the market is theoretically limited only by society’s ability to pay (like a Gucci handbag), which eventually narrows the field of those able to pay for them. There are no natural constraints on this process, because we collectively believe in ever-improving care.

(2) The flaws in the US system are glaring and getting bigger. As mentioned, much of these spiraling costs are borne by a smaller segment of the population (who can afford care). The US consumer truly does fund a massively disproportionate share of the R&D costs mentioned in this thread, due to the way in which the marketplace is structured.

(3) MRK always competed in the marketplace on having the best science (as opposed to price, e.g., when PFE kicked their ass in the statin space). When a company gets broadsided, as when the conclusive Vioxx study emerged, they returned to their roots, and attempted to replay the success of the Tylenol recall (among others), when a massive action aimed squarely at public safety negated the ill reputational effects relatively quickly. But in a post-Enron corporate environment, this strategy played out particularly badly ($4.8B badly).

It is surely possible to pull out individual acts of selfishnessness by companies who put profit over patient health, and the reverse is also true. But those who claim a systemic bias against patient health have obviously never had any contact with these organizations or the people who run them.