Health Care Reform Booby-Trap Number 2

Regardless of the ultimate fate of the again-endangered public option, the rest of the health care reform bill contains other booby traps that need attention.

Jane Hamsher at Firedoglake discusses the consequences of allowing Big Pharma to keep making obscene, windfall profits off life-saving drugs.

The public option has received the lion’s share of attention in the health care debate, but there is an equally important one relating to generic drugs that could mean the lifesaving drugs of the future remain too expensive for all but the wealthy.

Biologics are drugs made from living organisms, and they are considered the miracle drugs of the future. They are the new “blockbuster” drugs for the pharmaceutical industry. Herceptin, for breast cancer, costs $48,000 a year, and many insurance companies won’t cover it — or people quickly hit their limits and must pay for it out-of-pocket or go without.

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Pharmaceutical companies are trying to use healthcare reform to make sure these drugs never become “generics,” and thus stay extremely profitable. No surprise there.
But young medical and public health students across the country feel their hands are being tied as healers of the future, and they are coming out in protest.

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Laura Musselwhite, a medical student at Duke University and a member of the American Medical Students Association, writes:

Earlier this year, as a medical student at Duke University, I saw a patient with Crohn’s disease, an inflammatory intestinal disease associated with substantial disability and mortality that affects more than 500,000 individuals nationwide. This patient required hospitalization for a flare that she attributed to not being able to afford the month’s Humira, a biologic medicine used to treat severe, active Crohn’s disease.

The drug is priced by Abbott Laboratories at a staggering $22,000 a year. This patient would clearly have benefited from the availability of an affordable, generic version.

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Current biologics proposals, as they stand, will undermine one of the primary objectives of health-care reform — to limit costs — by in many instances creating almost indefinite monopolies. This will cost billions of dollars and more important, will leave expensive medicines unaffordable to the vast majority of Americans.

That’s just wrong. And POP will be joining with these students to help them fight for affordable drug prices. They shouldn’t have their hands tied by protectionist legislation that puts corporate profits over access to health care.

Read the whole thing.

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