Cheap Canadian Drugs!

You know what pisses me off? (No, not other people breathing my air, that's another rant.) It's my $900 health insurance premium. For that kind of money, I could have a hunting cabin.

This led me to think about drug commercials on TV. That made me pisseder offer (less happy).

Any doctor will tell you that most patients visit the doctor to get prescriptions of one type or another. It's become a machine – people are no longer going to the doctor to see what's wrong and get it fixed, but are going in because they already think they know what's wrong and want a specific type of drug for it.

Fat people want pills to make them lose weight while they eat like pigs. Some people go in to get antibiotics for any sniffle that enters their head. Sad unfulfilled housewives go in to get doped up on any number of different psychoactive drugs to make them happy in their crappy lives. Parents take their undisciplined brats in to get drugs that make them do what they are told. Hell, some people go in just because they want to stay zoned on percocet.

And the drug companies love it. They hawk their wares on prime-time TV selling Viagra and Cialis to old guys who can't get it up for the hags their once pretty wives turned into. Anti-herpies drugs are also a popular after-work commercial for the nymphos who are getting ready to go out on dates. They sell anti-depressants and diet aids during the afternoon when the stay-at-homes are in peak crying/pigging-out time. Then, finally in the late hours, they sell youth to the old, retired folk who don't have anything better to do than watch TV until 3 am.

Pharmaceutical Spending does not all go to R&D. More than 30% of it goes to marketing and administration. R&D gets short shrift at %11 and that's the first to go in adverse markets (what few of them that pharm has.) They create a self-perpetuating model of enhanced costs by buying TV time and magazine ads to push their products to people who then, in turn, push their doctors to prescribe them. Then they raise their prices to recover the marketing costs. When they say that their high prices are intended to pay for unreasonably strict FDA requirements, they're full of shit (that's my code phrase for "lying".)

Frankly, the practice of advertising prescription drugs to patients should be abolished. Advertise to the doctors - they're the ones who presumably have the knowledge and expertise to know when you need Vioxx or when Advil will do.

They cost me my hunting cabin. The bastards.

But the writing's on the wall for them (to be more trite than "full of shit".) Members of Congress are more than happy to suck up to contributors when it doesn't cost them anything. But now the Medicare is going to start paying for prescriptions. They're cheap. REAL cheap. When they realize what they're paying for, they'll be buying their stock from the sub-Sahara, made by genuine slave children.

...Or changing the laws. Doesn't matter to me, as long as I get my damned hunting cabin.