Supply of a Cancer Drug May Run Out Within Weeks. “A crucial medicine to treat childhood leukemia is in such short supply that hospitals across the country may exhaust their stores within the next two weeks, leaving hundreds and perhaps thousands of children at risk of dying from a largely curable disease, federal officials and cancer doctors say.
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Thank goodness President Obama is on the case, issuing executive orders! But the existence of any kind of shortage in a market-driven economy should make one’s nose twinkle. One drug shortage might be some kind of freakish anomaly, but 180 crucial drug shortages?
Atlas isn’t merely shrugging. Atlas is currently crawling on his back doing snow angel.
Too bad the Obama administration treat Atlas Shrugged as instruction on how to run an economy.
It’s the administration’s plan to increase the tax base.
When the govt can control the price on condoms due to setting the price of them to nothing, will we then have condom shortages which would increase the number of pregnancies…
Or is it a plan to increase the funding to Planned Parenthood and more crony governmentalism?
But everyone said Obama was so smart when he dictated the prices for drugs . . . you know helping the little guy, spreading the wealth around, socking it to the evil profit motivated big phara.
Ya ! You go Barry . . You da man !
‘Cause you’re soooooooooo smart.
It was all for the Children, even if they die.
Obama gets more power, while the blame falls on the drug companies. A win win for the Marxist Muslim. Indeed dead children of infidels, is a jihad in its own right.
Government always means retrogression of any service, when it dictates.
Yet the Marxist thugs never learn.
Just think of it as “post birth abortion” for the children…courtesy of Obama-Nation(tm) care.
Compassion in action don’t cha know?
Cheers
Hans Rupprecht, Commander in Chief
1st Saint Nicolaas Army
Army Group “True North”
Because the left “cares more”.
Who knew that John Galt guy owned a drug company?
Barrack Hussein Obamba hates little white kids with leukemia!
I’ll bet there’s no shortage of the drug that fights sickle-cell anemia.
OK so that’s racist……
This is just the beginning…
Spain owes the pharmaceutical companies over 7 BILLION dollars!! http://www.fiercepharma.com/story/spanish-minister-pledges-cover-pharma-debts/2012-01-19
Pharmacists in Greece can’t get aspirin, asthma inhalers etc http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-10/greek-crisis-has-pharmacists-pleading-for-aspirin-as-drug-supply-dries-up.html
Methotrexate is a backbone drug for a variety of cancer chemotherapies including colon cancer. At lower doses it treats rheumatoid arthritis and psoriasis. It is a critical drug. Patients are DYING SOONER. http://www.pharmalot.com/2012/02/drug-shortages-cause-cancer-patients-to-die-sooner/
In a free market economy, there should be no shortage of standard, lifesaving drugs used in large quantities. Therefore, we do not have a free market economy for drugs. One analysis blames anti-competitive group purchasing of hospitals (and governments) especially for generic intravenous drugs used primarily in hospitals, like methotrexate. http://www.superiormedicalsupply.com/connecting-the-dots-how-anticompetitive-contracting-practices-kickbacks-and-self-dealing-by-hospital-group-purchasing-organizations-gpos-caused-the-u-s-drug-shortage/
The drug companies are in it for the money. Anything owned by share holders is and if they can’t make a profit they will either restrict the product to drive up prices or shut down. When government meddles in anything that was private enterprise, it has the tendency to go bad. That said I consider Big Pharma amongst the biggest crooks in the world. They have even beat out Insurance companies for the title in my book.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AazObF_pHSU
Big Pharma, yu gotta love ’em.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AazObF_pHSU
http://elpais.com/elpais/2012/02/12/inenglish/1329056865_150584.html?
I can see this scenario happening in Ontario (or Quebec) in 5-6 years. People on the Ontario Drug Benefit Plan will have to pay a downpayment to the pharmacist before getting their drugs because the Ontario government will have defaulted on paying their pharma bills.
Fun times.
Frankly, I think drug prices will eventually fall as there will be no government or third party in the way.
I’m on the Ontario Drug Plan by virtue of the fact that I’m 65+. I pay a down payment ($100. per annum)
for a benefit I don’t want. My supplementary health insurance would pay for the drugs however the government insists they are the sole supplier and payor.
I’m curious how long it will be before we see freelance chemists making small batches of drugs which are in limited supply purely as the result of government regulations. There are lots of old drugs which are dirt cheap in third world countries and the bulk of the cost is the result of government regulation. L-tryptophan used to be quite cheap but then, once it became a prescription “drug”, it now costs about 10X what it did when it was a non-Rx supplement. Dichloroacetic acid was a cheap reagent until it was discovered that it might have anti-cancer properties and suddenly the price shot up far more than one would expect from a simple supply:demand situation.
The only thing that one generally needs to do to take reagent grade chemicals and make them into pharmaceutical grade is recrystallize them a couple of times or purify them through a chromatography column. There’s no shortage of drugs now in India or China where chemists are far less fettered by regulation. Methotrexate is an old drug and should be cheap so its lack of availability means that the cost of government regulation has become far too high. I’m sure pure methotrexate is available in powder form and all the pharmacists have to do is to mix up their own solutions (and no, it’s not nearly as toxic as the warnings given on it if one takes simple precautions).
Right now the majority of underground chemists concentrate on high profit drugs like MDMA and methamphetamine although there are some highly skilled individuals out there who synthesize LSD and less well known psychoactive phenylethylamines. Once the cost of unavailable drugs becomes high enough, watch for underground production to shift to these drugs. Cancer patients spend tens of thousands of dollars on quack cures in Mexico already so I’m sure they’d be ready to pay large amounts for drugs they need regardless of the source.
Drug shortages, gasoline shortages, electricity shortages. All are deliberately created to gouge consumers.
Loki
Technically, it’s not difficult to do as you say. But it is difficult to do this consistently with each dose/table/injection containing the said amount with the same disintegrating characteristics. It is hard to scale up these processes…ask a chemical engineer. Less of an issue with oral drugs though.
Compounding pharmacies are now being charged for doing as you say for a large error of mislabelling (they sent out the stock solution instead of the diluted solution. YIKES).
http://www.pharmalot.com/2012/02/compounding-pharmacy-charged-with-misbranding/
Drug shortages, gasoline shortages, electricity shortages. All are deliberately created to gouge consumers.
But of course, that’s how capitalism works. Capitalism is driven by profit at any cost, and isn’t hobbled by such attitudes like fairness, honesty, patriotism or altruism when they get in the way of profit.
Lamestream media reporting on this is nonsensical, it’s insulting. Again.
@ North of 60
“But of course, that’s how capitalism works”
Absolutely and since every CEO must maximizse profit to the shareholders, profit is the only objective or he/she is out of a job. The notion that any pharmaceudical corp. gives a sweet damn for the suffering victims is carefully crafted into advertising but belies reality.
Drug shortages, gasoline shortages,
electricity shortages.
Yes.
And with gas prices headed toward 4 dollars per gallon during an election year,
Pres. Oblamers ass will be gone..
He will try to blame it on the attack of Iran by Israel,
and not obeying his green initiative, gas should then go to 6-7 dollars a gallon.
Americans will vote their pocket change when the new Republican president is sworn in..