Medical Negligence
08.04.07 - 11:43am
What misdirection! A scheme that has a name so boring it sends you to sleep before you realise it is fleecing the taxpayer for £500million a year. Genius!
With bridges collapsing in the United States and the ongoing war in the Middle East, who wants to waste their time with something as crushingly dull as the Pharmaceutical Price Regulation Scheme? Well, when it is siphoning half a billion pounds a year out of our pockets to feather the pillows of one of the world’s most profitable industries it is worth paying attention to.
With the Office of Fair Trading finally blowing the whistle on the scheme the Government has basically been forced to renegotiate its deal with the pharmaceutical industry. Given the sheer amount of money involved, the story has garnered some interest from the mainstream media. According to the BBC:
The Office of Fair Trading recently condemned the Pharmaceutical Price Regulation Scheme which allows drug companies to set their own prices. It said the NHS was paying drug firms hundreds of millions of pounds too much for branded drugs…
The OFT suggested a move to pricing drugs based on health impact rather than the cost to manufacturers could save £500m from the NHS’ current drugs bill which stands at more than £8 billion a year.
Why would the Government be overpaying drugs companies such a gigantic sum of money? Here is a clue from a March 3 editorial from the British Medical Journal:
the scheme is tasked to secure the provision of drugs for the NHS at “reasonable prices” while simultaneously determining prices that are high enough to “sponsor” (more recently called “promote”) the wellbeing of UK based companies
Apparently the taxpayer has to fork out extra to promote the “wellbeing” of companies such as GlaxoSmithKline, with its £7.8billion net profit for 2006. Well there goes the free market. And I am sure patients deprived of dementia drugs, apparently too expensive for the NHS, will recognise the necessity of such an arrangement. According to the BMJ “the strands of the scheme are such that many of the outcomes run counter to the interests of the NHS”, but with the overpayment finally out in the open the Department of Health is having to act. The BMJ again:
Industry will not like these changes. Because the fine details for determining perceived clinical value are not yet spelled out, companies may be concerned that prices could be forced down. They may worry that the stability of financial returns will no longer be guaranteed, which would pose difficulties in long term investment.
Well cry me a river. I am pretty sure those billions upon billions of pounds of annual profits will help with “long term investment”. Time for the drug companies to take their medicine. Anything else would be medical negligence.
Great article (not just because it reiterates what I have written) on big pharma
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2007/aug/04/sciencenews?gusrc=rss&feed=networkfront
Another great post… I’m happy to have stumbled on this blog and have added you to my blogroll.
Here on Sam’s Plantation, Big Pharma plays these same games - whining and crying like there’s no tomorrow and bribing politicians so as to never surrender any of the profits that make them a top-5 industray in that category year after year as they fleece millions of poor and working class people out of hundreds and even thousands of dollars every month.
They definitely have been taking notes from US pharma.
I don’t even get overpriced health insurance for my tax dollars. All I get are bombs that kill small children.
Hopefully that’s not were your headed.