SINGAPORE (Xinhua) — Singapore scientists have found possible new ways to treat a type of aggressive breast cancer that is unresponsive to current forms of treatment, local broadcaster Channel NewsAsia reported on Wednesday.
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Obama stated not long ago that medicine has become more of a “business than a calling.” I could not disagree more with that statement. Medicine has remained a calling for many, but with the salary cuts and lack of regulation of insurance companies, physicians and surgeons have been forced to run a business. Obama has misinterpreted the situation. If you have read my previous posts, you understand that attending medical school at this time is close to a half a million dollar investment, followed by three to six years of a salary under $45,000, followed by one to five years of a salary under $60,000. If physicians have to spend $4,000 per month paying back loans for 10 to 25 years, and insurance companies will only pay 50% of what their procedures actually cost, one can imagine that pretty soon, the physician’s private practice has to operate as a business.
This is a small digression. My purpose in mentioning Obama’s statement is that in order to make up for the extreme debt and very low net salary of private practice physicians, private practices have participated in incentives given by pharmaceutical companies. These companies provide gifts, money, and various other incentives to physicians in order to ensure that their product is used. Often the drug companies will give significant monetary benefits for physicians to push the use of their product, and to push the drug over other, cheaper drugs that are essentially the same.
A law passed this summer in Vermont has set out to ban that practice. It is certainly for the benefit of the patients and their wallets to do so (and the physicians can only hope that reform comes soon so that they can stop taking all the hits when it comes to health care reform). The law, which was signed on June 8th, “bans gifts to physicians from manufacturers of prescription drugs, medical devices, and biologic products, with few exceptions.” These exceptions “include the provision of drug samples for free distribution to patients, the short-term loan of medical devices to permit their evaluation, and the distribution of journal articles and other items ‘that serve a genuine educational function.’”
What all of this really means is that Vermont has taken the first real step forward in an effort to reform the health care system. Perhaps Obama can learn from this, in that we do not necessarily have to change the entire health care system in one giant leap; we can chip away at it by ridding of the small but numerous abuses of the system.
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Decision Resources, one of the world’s leading research and advisory firms focusing on pharmaceutical and healthcare issues, finds that European prices of 170 best-selling drugs averaged 40 percent less than U.S. prices in 2008. Within Europe prices varied substantially, from an average of 55 percent of U.S. prices in Italy to 70 percent of U.S. prices in Germany. European prices for biologics averaged 86 percent of U.S. prices.
Many of the drugs that have the largest percentage price differentials between the United States and other markets are older drugs such as Eli Lilly’s Prozac, Sanofi-Aventis’ Ambien and Novartis’ Tegretol that have lost patent protection in some markets. Manufacturers of branded medicines in Europe typically cut the prices of these drugs when the products lose patent protection, whereas companies in the United States usually maintain brand prices following patent expiration.
“The current economic downturn will focus increasing attention on the cost of prescription drugs, and many payers will look to compare the prices they pay with prices in other markets. The United States is widely assumed to be by far the most expensive pharmaceutical market, but pharmaceutical companies and payers need to be aware of the enormous price variations by therapeutic area and drug type from one country to another,” stated Neil Grubert, M.A., Director of Pricing and Reimbursement Research at Decision Resources.
