Conservative U.S. Supreme Court to sick and dying Americans: Drop Dead!

"They say drug prices are too high? Shove the prices down their throats!"

The fearless defenders of the right to life of fertilized eggs, blastulas, gastrulas, and fetuses have new reason to rejoice at the appointment of right wing justices to the United Stated Supreme Court.

The right-to-life-loving justices have just delivered a message to the sick and the dying: Be sick and die. We don’t give a damn. We have obscene drug company profits to protect. Not to mention the right of rich corporations to pillage the little guy.

Maryland’s humanity 

vs. conservative greed

All of the above emerged when an attempt by the State of Maryland to regulate the outrageous prices of generic and out-of-patent drugs — drugs that help sick and dying people — was rejected first by an appeals court and then effectively by the so-called conservative Supreme Court.

Reports from Reuters and other news media, this one for example, say the Supremes refused to review the case, which was originally brought by a drug trade association representing manufacturers of generic drugs, and decided in their favor by the appeals court. 

The drug makers took deep umbrage at a Maryland law that would prevent, for example, companies like Mylan and Turing from hiking the prices of drugs whose patent has expired (or their generic equivalents) to stratospheric levels — within Maryland's borders.

This would have undone, in Maryland only, a practice that presents  many desperately ill people with a simple proposition: Your money (if you have enough) or your life.

Pay up or die

Just to remind you of what we’re talking about here, Turing raised the price of Daraprim, an anti-parasitic drug that was keeping AIDS victims and others alive from $13.50 a pill to $750 a pill. And yes, you'll need a lot more than one pill.

And Mylan, raised the price of EpiPen, an injection device that prevents allergy sufferers and others from going into anaphylactic shock and dying, raised the price of its product from $100 for a two-pack in 2009 to $608 in 2016.

Martin Shkreli, the former head honcho of Turing, is currently blogging, not always completely coherently, from a prison cell, where he belongs. He still has, according to his blog, 30 months left to serve on his sentence. The sentence is for an unrelated or loosely-related crime. And no, I’ll be damned if I’ll voluntarily link to his blog. Ever.

Heather Bresch, the CEO of Mylan, is less likely to do time, for any reason. That's because it’s who you’re related to, and not basic human decency or ethics that counts. Bresch’s father is U.S. Senator Joe Manchin, who also flacks against controls on global warming for coal interests. He says he’s a Democrat. Sometimes our tent is a little too big to suit my personal taste.

Maryland tries to

save its citizens. 

Lotsa luck on that.

Remember, the awful, unconscionable, outrageous thing that Maryland attempted to do was to regulate prices for generic drugs within its own borders. That law was struck down by the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of appeals last spring on the grounds that controlling prices in Maryland would somehow regulate trade outside of Maryland’s borders.

I’m not going to get tangled in the weeds concerning the finer points of law here. Feel free to go here and read the technical details until your eyes cross, which I can almost guarantee they will. 

Suffice it to say that the convoluted argument in favor of raping and pillaging sick people is ridiculous, and the legal justification is contradicted by other drug industry practices around the nation.

But your Conservative Supreme Court in action refused to review the lower court’s ruling, much less to change it. 

So much for the right to life when it stands in the way of making a quick and sleazy buck. 

Boof on that, Mr. Justice.

Mini rants, random ravings, muttered micro-babbling, and other stuff that’s too short all by their individual selves to make a blog post. But all together? Try this:

Which way is it, Mr. Trump? Delivered with all the sincerity he could suck off a teleprompter, Donald Trump’s State of the Union speech last night was a matter I’ll leave largely to pundits wiser and better briefed than I. However, there was one glaring inconsistency that I feel I must point out. He told us that economically we’ve never had it so good. We have more employment, for better money, for more people, than ever and ever hallelujah! And then he got into immigration, and how  immigrants are taking away all our jobs and driving down all our wages.

No no, Donald. You can have it one way. Or you can have it the other way. But you can’t have it both ways at once. (Except maybe in the case of those two hookers with full bladders in Russia.)

Trump and his damn wall. If he really wants to keep people from walking across the border, all he has too do is lay a minefield. Yes, people would get killed and maimed. Not to mention jackrabbits, field mice, gophers, rattlesnakes, and the occasional curiosity seeker and minefield tourist. What’s that you say? We don’t have minefield tourists now? Lay a minefield and we will. As P.T. Barnum, (or was it H.L. Mencken?) once said, nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public. You want proof? His name is Donald J. Trump.

How to make college — and prescription medicines — affordable at the same time.  I think I’m serious about this. Or partly serious. Or sort of serious. I mean it’s a crazy idea. But like flying into the sky with the help of an internal combustion engine attached to what’s essentially a pinwheel, which is in turn attached to a pair of giant dragonfly wings (thanks, Wright Brothers!) …or like curing previously deadly infections by injecting some kind of mold into peoples’ veins (thanks, Alexander Flemming)…or spending billions to fly men to the moon just so they could plant a flag there and burble some stuff about small steps and giant steps and mankind (thanks NASA and the Congresses that funded it)…this might work. I’m not saying it will. Just that it might. If we try it.

Suppose we pass a law — yeah, a radical law — that restricts all government funding of pharmaceutical research to not-for-profit universities. The universities would be entitled to earn a small-but-reasonable profit on drugs they invent, perfect and test — not the obscene profits private drug companies earn. 

Moreover, the universities would be required to apply those profits to tuition reduction for their own students. Some of the research would have to be farmed out to small liberal arts and technical colleges, and they would then share in the profits proportionately. (If the the small institutions don’t have the labs and technical chops for the drug research, let them handle the statistics and other details for the clinical trials.)

Bottom line: Drugs become less expensive. College becomes less expensive. America becomes healthier. Martin Shkreli’s and Heather Bresch's heads explode. I mean, it’s all nothing but positives. And now back to Donald Trump.

Can Trump be tricked into having a giant public meltdown? I’m not talking about an itty-bitty cursing fit, or another coded racist diatribe about good people on both sides. I’m talking about a screaming, yelling, kicking, table-pounding, foaming-at-the-mouth, foul-language explosion that reveals his inner six-year-old. Okay if you insist, not-so-inner.  How can we make that happen?

Let’s start calling some of the Trump organization’s Russian ventures what they clearly appear to be to many people, myself included: Treason, committed for reasons of venality. And let’s start demanding the death penalty, which I believe is still on the books for treason. Let’s start waving banners and chanting, “Trump. Treason. Death Penalty.” Let’s put it on bumper stickers. Let’s encourage the press to ask about it at every turn. I’ll betcha one of Howard Schultz’s Grande Venti Trenta super moccicato skim milk cold-brewed hot lattes that at some point, if we all keep up the treason pressure, The Trumpster loses it in public. I mean really, really loses it.

Speaking of Howard Schultz have you noticed that since he announced he’s considering running for president and everybody, me included, jumped down his throat and then crawled out of it again just to poo all over his bright idea, things have been quiet on the topic of the Barrista Presidency? Let’s make sure he lets the idea die a merciful death. To do so, we saner bloggers ought every so often to jump on Schultz’s not-so-bright idea and rip him a new one, just to remind him that a barrista  should stick to his espresso machine.

Where’s Kaepernick? Where’s Kaepernick? That’s not me asking the same question twice. That’s a proposed chant that ought to be chanted at every NFL football game. Colin Kaepernick is being punished for protesting racial violance. His protest was expressed by getting down on one knee during the salute to the American flag. It was visual. But it was also respectful. He didn’t turn his back, thumb his nose, spit, or walk off the field. He knelt, just as people in some churches do when they pray. A bent knee is always — I mean always — a sign of respect, not the opposite. 

The real disrespect to the flag — and to the people who died for it — is by those who would punish peaceful and respectful protest, the very thing our Constitution grants us and that the American flag symbolizes. But imagine if every football game from now on were delayed while the crowd chanting Where's Kaepernick?

Chant it over and over again: Where’s Kaepernick? Where’s Kaepernick? Where’s Kaepernick? Where’s Kaepernick? 

Remind the NFL every chance you get that they have furthered the cause of racism to make a filthy buck.

Members of Congress actually do something right about outrageous drug prices. Maybe.

Perhaps this will wipe the smirk off drug gouger 

Martin Shkreli’s face. Or not.

If a bi-partisan amendment to a Congressional bill passes on the House floor, drug gouger Martin Shkreli will have less to smirk about.

The bill started out merely to reauthorize fees that the Food and Drug Administration charges to makers of pharmaceuticals and devices.

But then, Representatives Kurt Schrader, a Democrat from Oregon, and Gus Billirakis, a Florida Republican, wrote an amendment to the bill, which would encourages drug manufacturers to compete against the gougers. The price gougers typically purchase a cheap drug whose patent has expired and then raise the price sky-high.

For example, Shkreli, the smirking poster boy for greed in the drug industry, obtained the manufacturing license for a drug called Daraprim and raised its price from about $23.50 per pill to $750 per pill.  The ability to purchase Daraprim, an anti-parasitic agent, can be a life-or-death matter for some patients.

And Shkreli’s not the only one. Among others high on the list of people not likely to be widely mourned if they were to get crushed by a wayward meteorite is Heather Bresch, who jacked up the price of the life-saving EpiPen by 700 percent. Needless to say, her bloodthirsty profiteering didn’t please mothers of allergic children likely to die of anaphylactic shock, an emergency condition that EpiPen treats. If you can afford it.

Schrader and Billirakis’ amendment, supported by lawmakers from both parties, encouraged manufacturers  to compete against drugs like Daraprim and EpiPen that are out of patent but made by only one supplier. The new competitors would get six months of exclusive rights to compete. The amendment additionally puts their product applications on a six months timeline for approval, and offers certain other benefits.

Theoretically, this ought to aid in the creation competition that will thwart the drug gougers. But only theoretically.

First, the trade publication Modern Healthcare is saying that “Some observers have questioned whether the legislation would have any effect.”

Further, the legislation with the attached amendment is a long way from getting passed. Despite the group of Congressmen finally acting in a bipartisan matter to benefit sick and vulnerable Americans, there’s no telling whether the entire House will go along. And second, even if the House passes the bill, there’s still the U.S. Senate to deal with.

Further, you can count on the Trump administration to try throwing a monkey wrench into the works. Modern Healthcare also reports that Health and Human Services Secretary Dr. Tom Price, a Trump appointee, now wants to “recalibrate” the fees that drug manufacturers pay for the FDA to examine and approve their medicines. That could lead to slowing down passage of the bill, and eliminating items like the Schrader-Billiarkis amendment.

You can almost be sure that the Shkrelis and Bresches of this world will fight to kill any bill that might keep them from stuffing their pocket with the money of the poor. And that might certainly include persuading Trump and Price to stomp on the bill, or its  competition-encouraging amendment. You know, competition is so….unAmerican.

All the same, we can hope.

Your money or your life, part II: Take four of these a day, and swallow hard.

The hardest pill to swallow is what sick people,
health insurance customers, and taxpayers are getting
forced to pay for drug companies' greed.

Less than a year ago, I had a hissyfit in this space about the drug gougers Martin Shkreli and Heather Bresch, who charged outrageous prices and made outrageous profits by selling  life saving drugs at unconscionable markups.

Now comes news that Shkreli’s old company, Valeant Pharmaceuticals, is at it again. This time it involves a formerly dollar-a-pill, four-times-a-day, or $1,460-a-year drug called Syprine. It’s a drug that saves sufferers of a rare malady called Wilson Disease from death by liver failure. New cost? Why, it’s only up to a mere $300,000 a year, a more than twenty times increase.

What’s even more upsetting, according to an article by former New York Times columnist Joe Nocera, published in Bloomberg View, is that the heartlessly greedy bastards who run the company are not only refusing to lower their markup, but also bribed a nonprofit association that supposedly represent sick patients with Wilson Disease to back off.

The tiny Wilson Disease Association, with revenue just a hair over $90,000 in 2014, was suddenly paid $100,000. according to Nocera. Whereupon, Valeant began declaring that it is in “partnership” with the Wilson Disease Association. The association protested, but its so-called protest did not including giving back the hundred grand. In my book makes them bought, whatever benefit they claim the $100,000 brought them.

The purpose of the bribe, according to Nocera’s article?

 For $100,000, Valeant purchased the right to say that it was working hand in glove with the Wilson Disease Association. As for the “conditions” it agreed to, consider this: Every time it uses its assistance programs to cover part or all of a patient’s co-pay, it is generating revenue that would be lost if the patient could no longer obtain the drug. 

Yes, Valeant has an “assistance” program that helps people who otherwise couldn’t afford to take the once buck-a-pill drug. But despite this assistance, it’s not only patients who suffer. It’s also you, if you pay taxes, or carry medical insurance with drug coverage. 

Nocera explains:

No matter what the patients’ out-of-pocket costs are, insurance companies and Medicare are still paying Valeant millions of dollars for a drug that just 11 years ago cost $1 a tablet. Which means that we’re all paying for Syprine, either as taxpayers or as insurance customers.  

Finally, though it is not something most of us think about, the need to rely on a drug so exorbitantly expensive takes a tremendous toll on patients and their families. They are always conscious that their insurance needs are costly to co-workers, especially if they work for a company that is self-insured.  

Brennan [a relative of a patient who needs Syprine] told me that some of his relatives are reluctant to go to the doctor fearing they could lose their jobs if escalating insurance costs hurt their employers. “It is a terrible feeling,” he said.  

[Former Wilson Disease Association president] Graper’s son who has the disease works in a small office that recently changed insurance plans. Under the new plan, everyone in the office now has to pay a $4,000 deductible. “How do you think it feels,” she told me, “to know that everyone in your office is paying for your Syprine?” 

If you haven't already done so, go here and read the whole horrifying article.

Your money or your life: Shkreli, Bresch, wheezing and choking children, and the Tyburn Jig

There used to be a time when they publicly hanged highwaymen. These were people who’d stop coaches on the road, flintlock pistols raised, and demand, “Your money or your life.” And they meant it.

When they were brought to justice, it was usually not a pretty picture. They were hanged, but not on a gallows from which a fall would break their necks. Highwaymen in the 18th Century died slowly and in frantic, panicked agony.

When everything was ready, the horses were whipped away, pulling the prisoners off the carts and leaving them suspended. They would only have a few inches of drop at most and thus many of them would writhe in convulsive agony for some moments, their legs paddling the air - “dancing the Tyburn jig” as it was known, until unconsciousness overtook them.

A new breed of highwaymen is abroad in the land today. Two of the most infamous are named Martin Shkreli, and Heather Bresch. I cannot reproduce their smirking photographs because the pictures  you should see are the property of news agencies, but if you take a look at Bresch here, and Shkreli here, it would appear that they were separated at smirk.

They both ride desk chairs instead of horses and their weapons are not pistols but prices. Both have unconscionably jacked up the prices of once-cheap life saving drugs for which there are no readily available substitutes. They’ve made fortunes by threatening and actually putting at risk the lives of innocent children, the elderly, and the physically frail. 

In Shkreli’s cased the drug in question is Daraprim. The magazine Vanity Fair reports:

Dara­prim, is on the World Health Organization’s List of Essential Medicines because it treats toxoplasmosis, a parasitic infection that is particularly dangerous to pregnant women, people with compromised immune systems, and the elderly. In that vulnerable population it can lead to seizures, blindness, birth defects in babies of infected mothers, and, in some cases, death.

Shkreli, through a company he controlled, Turing Pharmaceutical, raised the price from $13.50 per Daraprim tablet to $750. Usually, it’s taken for 21 days, a total cost  of $15,750 per patient at the jacked up price. Your money or your life.

Shkreli’s defense has been that medical insurance pays for most of it anyway, and he, a multi-millionaire if not a billionaire, paid $750 for his I-phone, so what’s the big deal if he charges $750 per pill? There are at least three reasons it’s a big deal.

First, not everybody has medical insurance, and so some individuals and families — for whom the $15,000 for a full medical regimen can be close to a year’s take home pay — are forced to flirt with bankruptcy or watch someone they love die needlessly. 

Second, even if medical insurance paid for 100 percent of the price (which it doesn’t) the cost gets passed on to all Americans, via hikes in our insurance premiums and in our taxes. So in effect, we are all being held at pistol point by this thug. 

Third, Shkreli’s  greed-motivated initiative will — and already has — lured others into the pharmaceutical highway robbery business. So he has made the problem he created for the rest of us a growing problem.

Shkreli, who is also under indictment for fraud in a separate case, shows the remorse of a python gorging itself on a pig. The consequence of his misbehavior, he tweets, is that he’s getting more sex.

Martin Shkreli

Verified account

@MartinShkreli

Martin Shkreli Retweeted Vincent

none, getting laid more i guess

Martin Shkreli added,

Vincent @johnvincentsays

@MartinShkreli what changes did you applied to your life after the whole media mess? (serious question)

Meanwhile, a copycat highwayman — well, highwaywoman in this case — got caught pointing her loaded flintlock of a price hike at little children and threatening the equivalent of blowing their heads off.

I’m referring to Heather Bresch, CEO of Mylan, the company that makes EpiPen.  That'sthe product that saves adults and especially vulnerable little kids from dying while gasping for breath — due to allergic reactions to certain commonplace foods and other substances.

By steadily raising, and then raising again, and then re- and re-raising the price of EpiPen, Bresch finally managed to also raise the ire of parents of those vulnerable children. They took to the Internet, raised hell on social media, and ended up flooding Congress with 100,000 letters of righteous protest. The indignation was palpable. The New York Times reports:

...parents began posting receipts showing how much they were paying for EpiPens. One photo showed a Costco pharmacy receipt from Chandler, Ariz., for $1,698.28 that a parent had paid for three boxes of EpiPens, six pens total. A single mother from New Hampshire had a receipt for $925 for a two-pack of EpiPens.

This may have been a grave embarrassment for Senator Joe Manchin, Democrat of Virgina, who happens to be the father of this child-killing thug-ette. 

It certainly explains why child-endangerer Bresch relented. Well, sort of relented. Mylan has agreed “to expand its coupon and patient assistance programs,” The New York Times reported. So only those parents who who are deemed rich enough to pay full price will have to. At least until Bresch changes her mind again.

And that’s not good enough. Highway robbery is highway robbery and ought to be treated as such. This nation needs a law that would make price gouging of monopoly drugs necessary to save lives — drugs like EpiPen and Daraprim — the vicious felony that it is.

Think about this: if somebody steals your car, he’s liable in some states to serve over eight years in prison. 

Currently, if the same person steals through price hikes your family’s money for an EpiPen or a Daraprim prescription, the only penalty is social pressure.

Yet the cost of the theft to each individual can be the same, or far more, than the loss of a car. 

So this nation needs a law that would make price gougers guilty of a felony, punishable by five years in a maximum security prison, for each person gouged. Remember, these highway robbers don’t gouge just one or two people. They gouge thousands of sick people and their families.

Five years per person gouged, sentences to be served consecutively. Somehow, I think that after the first twenty or thirty years buried alive in prison steel and concrete, Shkreli and Bresch might not be tempted to rob the vulnerable again.

Nor would other drug company executives.

Tell your Senators you want long prison terms for drug price gougers.

Oh, and also tell them you want Joe Manchin forcibly recused by his party from any committee, subcommittee, or matter relating to laws concerning healthcare and most especially pharmaceuticals.