After the discussion about Waukegan Harbor, and a few minutes after some initial talk about the economy, Mark Kirk's town hall meeting deteriorated into a series of odds and ends of misinformation. One man stood up to tell us all that he's a geologist and swears that global warming has nothing to do with our actions here on earth. I cannot tell you how that exchange ended because it actually required me to walk out of the room for a minute as I reminisced about the man in Palatine several years ago who lambasted Democrats for not allowing his daughter to get her social security up front and become a millionaire by investing it in the stock market. Those two men must be related.
Another person made the valid point that Kirk has always been against importing cheaper prescription drugs from Canada. Kirk defended that by saying he didn't want us getting prescriptions from China that might be dangerous, but neglected to mention his role in making trade deals with China without requiring anything from them.
Ultimately backing down on disapproval of Canadian imports and calling Mexico a "stupid" country in a gratuitous racist sounding swipe, he agreed with another constituent who said we had to be very careful to protect drug company patents because if we didn't, they wouldn't have money for R&D to come up with new drugs. I know that sounds logical, but it's really not true. I've mentioned this before, recently. The drug companies are not spending the big bucks on R&D. They're spending it on marketing. That little depressed cartoon blob guy who bounces around aimlessly until he takes an antidepressant, the woman already on anti-depressants who is still depressed and all those men on TV talking about their sexual problems get the big pharma bucks.
What is really happening is that pharmas work their patents to squeeze large amount of money out of the American public. This is from Dean Baker writing for Truthout:
Perhaps the most obvious example along these lines is patent protection for prescription drugs. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services projects that the country will spend more than $330 billion in 2012 for prescription drugs. These same drugs would cost roughly $30 billion in the absence of patent protection. This means that the government's patent monopolies will be redistributing roughly $300 billion in 2012 from patients to the drug companies. (There are alternatives to patent monopolies for financing the research and development of prescription drugs.)
Take a look at this video about how drug companies extend their patents by making small changes or simply remarketing the drug for a different use. The video shows how one drug company used marketing to turn simple shyness into a mental illness and how another pushed anti-depressants to children, and yet another selling prozac under a new name to women for a new disorder that pretty much amounted to premenstral stress. These companies actually created new conditions without researching whether they really existed and made minor changes to old drugs to rename them sell them as new drugs for more money. This was all done to open markets and extend patents.
Another view comes from this New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell. The article begins by telling the story of "the Shark Fin Project.". This was an internal name for the remarketing of Prilosec, a heartburn medication, into Nexium. Gladwell describes how Nexium was repackaged at a higher price and kept generics out of the market. However, he goes on to describe how our pricing of prescription drugs is not just the fault of the drug makers engaging in this type of behavior. It's also the fault of doctors who prescribe these new drugs when older drugs with fewer side effect risks, or at least more well known ones, are available. The article also faults the insurance companies that don't require older cheaper drugs be tried before the newer expensive ones will be covered and publishers of reports on studies that suggest breakthroughs without scientific support. I've mentioned the FDA's role in misleading drug related publications before on the blog.
After oversimplyfying the issue of prescription drug prices, we moved to a question about outsourcing. A man in the back of the room expressed concern that companies were outsourcing jobs outside of the United States. Kirk responded that outsourcing is no longer a problem. It was another of the great benefits of global depression he lauded. What Kirk failed to tell the man is that his concern is not only still very important, but funds from the Bush/Paulson bailout arebeing used by the financial industry to outsource its workforce. That means that taxpayer dollars meant to stimulate our economy were used to pull jobs out of our economy. Bernie Sanders has introduced an amendment to the stimulus package to require bailed-out banks where there have been layoffs to hire only Americans for two years. It passed a voice vote in the Senate, but it's still unclear whether this amendment is going to survive the chopping block. I guess the Senate disagrees with Congressman Kirk when he says that outsourcing is no longer a problem.
Most likely, Mark Kirk is taking his nonsensical stand on the stimulus plan from republican party talking points rather than his own "thoughful and independent" mind, the independent judgment he keeps telling us about but rarely displays. republicans see their unbending opposition to the country's stimulus plan as a stimulus plan for their party. So, when you come down to it, what Kirk is doing is sacrificing the country for the republican party. Do you think that's a good trade for our congressman, the guy who represents you, to be making?
