USA hoy: El "precio" de/en una apuesta electoral...

In a recent guest piece on STAT entitled “Say what you will about Donald Trump. He’s right about drug companies,” Dr. Charles D. Rosen enthusiastically supports Mr. Trump’s negative views on the pharmaceutical industry. 
Dr. Rosen, a clinical professor of orthopedic surgery at UC Irvine, believes that the Republican presidential nominee is correct on some key issues including:

• -allowing Medicare to negotiate prices with drug companies 
• -allowing cheaper pharmaceutical drugs manufactured abroad to be sold in the U.S. 

Both points are worthy of debate. Unfortunately, rather than provide thoughtful commentary, Dr. Rosen (who is also the president of the Association of Medical Ethics) goes into a variety of rants to support his views. 

For example, on Medicare drug price negotiations, a position that the Democratic candidate, Sec. Hillary Clinton, also supports, rather than acknowledging the bipartisan backing of such a proposal, Dr. Rosen trashes Clinton’s credibility on following through with her publicly stated stance:

"Hillary Clinton, on the other hand accepted more cash from pharmaceutical companies in the first six months of her campaign than any other candidate in either party. This lessens the potency of her claims to take similar action and suggests yet again disingenuous declarations. If she claims to be such an enemy of Big Pharma, why then are they contributing to her campaign? … Unlike Hillary Clinton, whose campaign coffer is loaded with contributions from drug companies, Trump has barely dipped into that pot of besmirched gold. Yes, Trump is defying Republican dogma, but he’s honestly and forthrightly calling Big Pharma on its Big Baloney".

The same can be said for Dr. Rosen’s views on drug importation. This is a great topic for discussion. Unfortunately, Dr. Rosen goes into another attack: 

The drug lobbies have succeeded in making the importation of prescription drugs illegal under various self-serving agendas, disguised as “for the public good” and “protecting the drug companies” so they can continue to innovate. Both of those charades are laughable.

 Big Pharma is big business; its objective is to make money for its stockholders. 

There is nothing wrong with that, but don’t be fooled by the avalanche of ads positioning these corporations as do-gooders. It’s well-known that drug companies’ budgets for marketing are higher than for R&D. 
That false tune of the cost of innovation is plain stupid and a lie. 

Ver:
Desmitificando el costo de desarrollo de un nuevo medicamento.

Wow! Dr. Rosen really goes into attack mode here. I find it interesting that Dr. Rosen attacks the industry at a time when cancer treatment is being revolutionized (Bristol-Myers, Merck, Novartis, Pfizer, etc.), hepatitis C has been cured (Gilead, AbbVie), a vaccine for Ebola is entering clinical trials (Merck), etc., etc.–all thanks to the INNOVATION of the biopharmaceutical industry. If you want to debate the costs of these breakthroughs, that’s fine and a worthy topic. But don’t denigrate the industry’s creativity and hard work, and the “do-gooders” that work in these R&D labs.

As for spending more on marketing than R&D, yes, that’s true. However, how do you sell drugs without sales and marketing? Are physicians, payers and patients supposed to learn of these drugs by osmosis? In addition, Dr. Rosen fails to mention that the biopharmaceutical industry spends 15% of its top-line revenues on R&D–WAY more than any other industry. Should, as predicted above, legislation be passed to allow for Medicare drug price negotiations, biopharmaceutical revenues will be impacted and there will be LESS available for R&D investments.(...)

Apostaron a ganador...?
Pronto sabremos.

Ver:

Big Pharma apostó por Obama. Ganó?

Tomé prestado de The Problem With Donald Trump's Attitude Toward Drug Companies/John LaMattina