Part 2 of my interview with Adam Reakes of the Herd Mentality Podcast! We talk about more random topics, and crack a few more jokes. Adam announces his candidacy for president of North Korea.
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Sorry man, ramble time!
BTW where’s your partner, missing him too!
I think the problem with “big pharma” reputation, (and perhaps the rise of craptastic alternative medicine) is a few problems with their sometimes predatory business tactics. Of course what many people on the receiving end really see is pay or become sicker, or even die, and not companies just trying to do business. Its a sad that this emotional reaction cause some people to seek out much worse alternative medicine, but Its a natural reaction to save some cash.
For example here in the part of Canada I live in, we have a combined public health care system, supplemented with private insurance. Both the government and the insurance companies pushed for more use of generic medications to save money (around 90 million a year). Good thing for us paying into the systems. However, some of the pharma suppliers from the states took exception to this, and push back by raising costs and limiting access to other drugs they still have the patents too.
Though limiting our purchase of brand name medications as supplement for generic supplies not matching peak demand is by far the biggest problem we’ve had with them. While generic suppliers exist, their supply train is often slow, and hindered by big pharma constantly putting pressure on them; its really no different than Wal-Mart trying to take out ma-and-pa stores, only in this case its for flu medication, or cancer treatments.
Lastly, often “Big Pharma” develop new treatments faster than insurance or government can get the paper work in order to cover it; or hold patents to extremely rare treatments that are costly enough that no one wants to cover them; we see this on those “feel good-feel bad” stories you might see on local news of some kid, woman or guy forking out $10,000 a month for treatment, and its not covered; though this equal the fault of insurance (and here in Canada government) of not keeping up.
I don’t begrudge big pharma earning their cash either, especially for some the research they sponsor and perform, but is pretty easy to see how they got their bad guy reputation.