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Tony944[_3_]

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...
On Monday, October 14, 2013 8:04:01 AM UTC-4, Stormin Mormon wrote:
On 10/13/2013 9:33 PM, wrote:

I happened to see Andy Grove giving a lecture at Berkley on

TV recently. This healthcare thing has been of some interest

to him for a long time now. He gave an example of one kind

of problem. The FDA was given the authority in the 60's to

determine if a drug was not only safe, but "effective". If

they say it's effective, then healthcare providers pretty

much have to give it to you. So

you have a cancer drug that studies show prolongs the life

of patients that without it die in 2 years. The drug extends

the life expectancy by two months. But per the FDA law, it

meets the definition of effective. So, we have insurance

companies, Medicare, Medicaid, paying for the drug. The cost?

$80K per year for one patient.

One friend of mine, has chronic back pain. One pain med

works OK, to help reduce her pain. But, due to federal

guidelines, they are trying to change her over to a more

politically correct med -- which doesn't help, and she's

in pain again. I'm not pleased with neckties in DC telling

a practicing medical doctor in NY what he cannot prescribe.

Another fine example of how healthcare keeps going up is
the FDA now has a bug up it's ass about putting drugs that
have been used for 100+ years through the testing that is
required today. Never mind that we have a 100+ years of
them being widely used safely. So, the way it works is they
find a drug manufacturer that's willing to undertake that
big expense. That drug maker then gets the exclusive right
to sell the drug for many years.

Example of this is colchicine, which has been used forever
to treat gout attacks. It cost ~$20 for a prescription.
It still does in foreign countries. But here in the USA,
it's now illegal and you can only buy Colcrys, which costs
several hundred dollars for the same prescription. And
it's exactly the same drug, colchicine, just that it's
being sold only by Takeda who cut the deal with the FDA
and did the testing. And of course the testing showed
that it was safe and effective, as hundreds of years of
wide usage had already proven.

As I said many times before everything that goes on in this country
is back by wall street "Lobbyist" a Terrorist group back by Wall Street
that runs our country they are the ones that persuade our crooked
Legislators to do what ever they want.