Saving on medicine to spend on roses
The Times has reported:
Petals from 156,000 roses were used yesterday to make the infiorata, a 13-metre-long lush carpet, which was laid out on the Għarb parish church parvis before the feast procession started.
Funny how we rage at the very thought of profit being made on medicines but then look with fond admiration at the people who buy 156,000 roses at tremendous expense to rip off the petals and lay them out in a short-lived ‘carpet’ for a procession of people to walk over.
You can’t beat it.
As the debate on the price of pharmaceuticals hots up, it becomes increasingly obvious that what people want is not to spend less on Canesten pessaries and erectile dysfunction pills (why would they bother, when they spend so much on everything else?) but for suppliers to earn less.
That’s why the debate has been joined by people who have never bought a Canesten pessary in their lives and never will, but as long as somebody, somewhere is earning money, then they’re going to object.
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That rose, coupled with all this talk on erectile dysfunction, somehow reminds me of …
Naughty, naughty, Min Weber
While the government battles with pharma importers to bring prices down, the prime minister uses the market forces argument to justify the new, higher price of gas supplied by the state monopoly. Unbelievable.
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20100705/local/taxpayer-shall-not-subsidise-businesses-gonzi-insists
I would have expected this comment from the leader of the opposition, my friend.
In Sweden one of our dear parties – Feminist Initiative – decided to set fire to €10,000 in notes in protest at the wage difference between men and women. There are idiots everywhere I suppose.
do you know how much a full page colour ad costs on large foreign newspapers?
Is there some medicine on that list published by the government that will eradicate the disease of envy and related hatred from this country?
Daphne, did you expect them to cover the parish church parvis with Levitra instead?
This age is obsessed with illicit-sex seen as some sort of sport. Many great psychologists of international stature and fame have described it as “a bankrupt age.”. They argue that an age obsessed with sex is an age “afraid of death”. Sex as sport is the antithesis of love: “It is the enjoyment of one’s animal function through the other’s animal function.” It is a far-cry from the total self-giving it becomes (or should become) in marriage. Nothing is more psychosomatically-damaging or psychosomatically-rewarding than the sexual act: It destroys if illicit; ennobles and strengthens if proper. Check it out with one of the world’s leading authorities on mental health, Psychiatrist Dr Ray Guarendi! Or ask Carl Jung about the reason why 90 % of his patients visited him. His reply: “Because they have fallen away from their religion.”
Sex outside of marriage is NOT love. And “sex without love is a rehearsal for death.” : I quoted this to a top-notch German lady-psychiatrist who is a very-good friend of mine. “That’s correct”, she replied, “but if I were to say that so overtly to my patients, they would stop coming to me.” That’s this God-less, irreligious, and secular age for you, hellbent as ever on self-destruction.
Name dropper!
But then Mark Flowers, explain to me Boccaccio’s Decameron and Staparola’s Piacevoli Notti? And the Mary Magdalene cult created in the Middle Ages to curtail prostitution? And filles de joie who took place in public parades, completely naked – at least in France? And the need for Trent to introduce the public element in marriage so as to avoid women being taken for a ride?
Where they too afraid of Death?
When was there an age when Man was not afraid of Death?
Your comments sound slightly romantic…
There are people who burn money, others spend them on infioratas , others run a website, and others expect people to pay unjustified prices for monopolised medicine.
The pharmaceutical market in Malta is not the groceries market.
Doctors get commissions on branded medicines they prescribe, many pharmacies in Malta are owned by the same persons who also import medicines.
We rage at people who make indecent profits on people’s ailments.
[Daphne – When are profits indecent, and why is it reprehensible to profit from ailments when it is not reprehensible to profit from women’s irrational fixation with shoes? More illogical thinking, I’m afraid, John: the pharmaceutical companies you condemn for profiting from ailments are the ones who research, discover and manufacture the cures and treatments for those ailments. You use the products even while condemning the people who made it possible for you to use them.]
This medicines market in Malta is not being played on a level playing ground.
[Daphne – There can never be a level playing-field when the products involved are unique. When they are not unique, the playing-field is level. If you think Panadol costs too much or the supplier is making too much profit off your back and you don’t like the idea of other people making a profit, then buy another painkiller or use a natural remedy like lying down on the floor and screaming.]
and why is it reprehensible to profit from ailments …
A fair profit is commendable and necessary, nobody in his/her right mind would think otherwise. If you look at the large pharma corporations though you’ll find that they spend an awful lot of money on researching, developing and marketing lifestyle drugs for manufactured mental diseases. They also hold on to medical patents after expiry by submitting ‘new’ medical properties at the end of the five years to keep generics out. Because of the legalities around medical patents, Aids patients had to take an assortment of pills all day every day to keep their illness under control. When an Indian pharmaceutical company combined the regimen into a couple of easy to ingest pills the western companies were up in arms. They don’t give a hoot about anything but insane profits.
They do precious little fundamental research themselves as it’s a risky money pit that the shareholders cannot condone.
Who’s spending most money on cancer research? Governments giving grants to small labs and universities. In 2008 the US spent $5b on cancer research alone. In short big pharma and all the other big corporations get insane profits but shirk away from risk.
Here’s this year’s soundbite: “privatise profits socialise losses”
… when it is not reprehensible to profit from women’s irrational fixation with shoes
it is very shallow and mean to compare healthcare with shoes. If you’re sick, you have no option but to look for a solution that works. Shoes you can opt to buy something that works cheaply but is not fancy.
I’m afraid the current libertarian trend of propping old people’s quality of life with private pensions is broken. Gonzi is getting into the private pensions game when it’s too late. Let me use BP as an archetype for all large private corporations:
Big corporations sitting on useful services like BP can do what they do because governments have their hands tied both ways: BP controls a fair chunk of energy production. US & UK government shapes foreign policy to feed BP (ex AngloIranian Oil Company) because society has been structured in a way that it needs oil all the time.
BP cannot fail to produce large profits because insurance companies, hedge funds and more importantly pension funds are major shareholders that need the annual profits to actually remain viable.
BP can and does cut corners to meet shareholder profitability and destroy the Gulf Coast and $billions in the area’s economy, not to mention the ecological impact. Nobody can do anything about it, not even Mr double-punch Hope and Change Obama. The system is structurally broken and it’s not going to change anytime soon.
Just spare me the shallow Randian rants please. It’s insulting.
No Daphne, ruthless individual capitalism is indecent. One may then rightly ask, what constitutes a fair profit?
But then again, fair and open competition is often ‘sabotaged’ through monopoly and deception.
[Daphne – Move on, Brian, and put away your Lenin posters. Demand, supply and competition do the work quite well, thank you.]
You have taken a Marshallian stance on this subject, your way of thinking brings economic stability, however there is a hitch to your theory – unfortunately it only works well on paper.
Sometime last year Germany and Switzerland faced price hikes on medicinal products. The German government intervened to protect the consumer (albeit unsuccessfully) due to fierce lobbying from pharmaceutical companies. However, the Swiss government succeeded, slashing and controlling said products. Therefore in your opinion, both German and Swiss governments are now leaning towards Leninist socialism.
[Daphne – Funny, but I found myself engaged in a similar argument beneath another post: that the more inclined towards control and fascism a culture is, the more it is enamoured of titles, and the other way round. Germany and Switzerland are both, historically, control-cultures. A fixation with control is not the sole preserve of Leninism and Marxism.]
Never had a Lenin poster…mind you I did have one of Ernesto Guevara stuck on my bedroom wall …..decades ago, looked cool then.
One more thing which I forgot to add , the prices of these fifty medicines are at par with the rest of Europe now, the detail we forgot is that in Malta there’s no VAT on medicines. So , medicines should cost at least 15% less than other places in Europe.
We also have to keep an eye to see whether generic pharmaceuticals are being packed as branded medicine, and where these medicines are being stored.
[Daphne – For heaven’s sake.]
You got a good reply for your comments above from Brian and Mr Borg.
I know there are decent people who get their fair share as profits from medicines, no one is arguing about that, after all there is a amount of risk in this business.
An ex-delivery man told me that doctors get 90% commission on a certain brand of antibiotics which they PUSH, yes 90%. I don’t want to believe this but if this is true would you call this decent?
[Daphne – Give me five minutes to compose myself. Ninety per cent of what? The retail price? The wholesale price? Use your brain, John. Aren’t you an engineer or something? So let’s see now: doctors get 90% for ‘pushing’ the product and the businesses which bring it to the consumer (the manufacturer, the distributor and the retailer) split the remaining 10% between them. I guess we know now why that driver was a driver and not, say, an investment banker. Must be a friend of Anglu Farrugia.]
When they prescribe me antibiotics I just see for myself whether I need them or not, and when they write down some branded medicine I ask the pharmacist if she’s got any equivalent generic medicine.
In Switzerland if you catch a cold the doctor recommends to you to rest and have cups of warm camomile tea. Why are Maltese doctors different?
Dr Said is not tackling the root cause of the problem; he’s removing the webs but not the spiders.
This is not Leninism this is plain common sense.
[Daphne – Yet again, you are confusing two separate issues: 1. the price of medicines and 2. the unnecessary prescription of medicines like antibiotics.]
@Brian
In actual fact Germany has moved aggressively on its ever increasing pharmaceutical bill (37 billion EUR in 2008) by delegating most of it to insurance mega-corporations like AOK.
These private funds have been very effective in reducing pharmaceutical associated costs. In fact generic manufacturers’ profit margins have plummeted to 3-15% on COG; a situation which favors the large multinationals.
Demand, supply and competition working effectively to the consumer’s advantage.
@Stefan Vella
Flip your coin and you shall see differently.
’29th June, Germany’s government moved on Tuesday to break drug makers’ grip on prices with a bill aimed at saving the creaking health care system about €2 billion a year.’
‘7th July, The centre-right government’s health reform plan was blasted Wednesday by opposition parties, unions and insurers as a failure to tackle the deep problems with the health system that would burden the poorest.’
I ask you this, who will be carrying the greatest burden? Pharmaceutical companies, the government, insurance companies or the poor sod in the street?
Watch out for the smoke and mirrors.
But enough of this as we are going out of context.
@ Stefan Vella, how will the germans manage to make it work when privatised health care in the US is an immoral broken mess that is costing double per patient what it costs in the most expensive socialised systems?
Here’s a cringe worthy snippet from an article written by an ER specialist in San Francisco. The rest is available on Harper’s website…subscribers only unfortunately.
——————-
I spent my early childhood in a trailer in Texas, so I thought I knew something about barriers to health-care access, and maybe even something about poverty. Then I became an emergency physician in Oakland.
…
The county hospital E.D. is where those with no insurance and no money go. The elderly and disabled who qualify for Medicare and Medicaid may also go there, but they often take the insurance elsewhere.
…
Not infrequently, the primary reason for a visit to the hospital is listed as “Lost Insurance” or “Lost Kaiser” (one of the country’s largest health-maintenance organizations); once the form just said “Lost,” but we all knew what it meant. Every week we see patients with decompensated chronic disease who say, “I was doing fine until I lost my job and couldn’t get my meds.”
…
There are those who have lives so complicated—by three jobs, or six children—that a 3 a.m. emergency visit is all they can manage. They come to the county E.D. because we are always open, and refuse care to no one.
…
The failure of preventive primary care creates emergencies that should never have been. The county hospital sees diseases that have become the worst versions of themselves: what should have been simple diabetes, requiring oral medication and diet change, presents as diabetic ketoacidosis, a life-threatening condition of acid in the blood. We see severe infections that are treatable only with amputation but that once were simple cellulitis, requiring antibiotics; and numerous strokes, which could have been prevented through blood-pressure control. Although the E.D. tries to give patients what they need, it cannot offer them a phone number they can call for refills or the chance to see the same doctor year after year.
…
The triage nurse passed me a handwritten note from a patient in the waiting room. It read:
Please help me. My jaw has been broken and I am in a lot of pain. I’ve been here over an hour and am still bleeding. My hands and feet are numb and I’m starting to shake. I need some care. I have insurance.
The engineer who wrote the note was in his mid-thirties. He had been prescribed cough medicine with codeine for a viral illness and had passed out in his bathroom, breaking his jaw and several teeth on the sink as he fell. His injuries were no more and no less painful than some of those resulting from violence in Oakland. What was striking was that a highly educated young man could think that his pain, bleeding, and shaking might not get him care in one of the best hospitals in the country but that his insurance would; he could assume that the brief wait before he was seen was due not to the stroke and heart-attack patients who had come in just before him but to our suspicion that he did not have insurance. When even the privileged feel their access to care is so vulnerable, it becomes hard to argue that the system is working for anyone.
—–
Anybody thinking that a private system will make things automatically better most probably believes in fairy tales as well… obviously loads of money and connections will get you anywhere, even in the US of A.
@ Stefan Vella
a quote from the World Socialist (gasp!) WebSite quoting the Süddeutsche Zeitung:
Commenting on the trend in German taxation, Peter Bofinger, a member of the German Council of Economic Experts, wrote in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, “If we had the tax rates that were in place in 1998, we would have 75 billion euros more revenue per year.”
Now you know what the real problem is… the gap between rich and poor is superseding the barbaric times before 1930’s crash and the resultant social backlash. The real story is that the middle class is evaporating. We’re at the end of a golden age that will take a long time to come again. On a better note though many poor countries might get a shot at lifting themselves out of abject poverty.
@Brian & Joseph
I presented an economic argument as seen from the pharmaceutical industry’s point of view of pure profit. I admit that a couple of sentences cannot be but superficial. They are based on professional market reports like EMS and ResearchandMarkets.com.
The Germans have not privatised their health care system; they have delegated pharmaceutical sourcing and distribution to private insurance funds. It is in the interest of these companies to source the cheapest medicines by tender as the system is built in such a way that their profits are realised by cannabalising the pharmaceutical industry’s margins. No government will ever reach their efficiency levels on this point.
I do not have enough knowledge of America’s healthcare system so I cannot rebut that point.
The quoted articles are both political. Call me a cynic, but I rarely attribute credibility to emotionally charged political statements. I prefer cold hard numbers.
We are probably better off agreeing to disagree since we approach this topic from opposite ends.
@ stefan: thanks for the interesting info. I’ll try to look it up
Yet again, you are confusing two separate issues: 1. the price of medicines and 2. the unnecessary prescription of medicines like antibiotics.
Honest people in this business don’t resort to such tactics (1&2), greedy and unscrupulous ones do give doctors perks and commissions so that they prescribe importer’s overpriced products. That’s why these are not separate issues.
[Daphne – Ho-hum. The usual tarring of everyone with the same brush. You might as well take you argument all the way back to the manufacturer, and refuse to buy any medicine at all on the grounds that too much of the price represents profit, CEO’s salaries, jollies for doctors at international conferences, unnecessary research expenses, etc. And then you can drop dead or suffer your illness purely on a point of principle. And see where that gets you.]
Jeez, Marcus. You must either be a priest or a monk, (if not, you missed your calling.) Your ‘very good friend top-notch German lady-psychiatrist got it right. Get real, or ‘self-destruct’.
Hi, daphne, dare I ask: why are you denying me the right to reply? Nothing long-winded in what I submitted. They shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it, you know… Moreover, I am always tongue-in-cheek: Nothing rankles inside. No hard feelings, no bad blood, no “marrara”. Have a pleasant evening!
[Daphne – Marcus, just stick to the point, please. A couple of sentences and that’s it.]
@ John Schembri and all those with a similar mindset
Why consult a doctor if you believe they are all corrupt and their advice is not to be believed?
I have been hearing such nonsense all my professional life even from people who are supposed to have the education and intelligence to know better.
While I have heard of doctors who are a disgrace to their profession, every profession has its bad apples, the vast majority truly only have their patients at heart, even if this is not essentially altruism as it’s the way most earn their living and support their families.
Most medical research is supported by commercial entities who hope that the end result will be a product they can sell at a profit. This includes most ‘independent’ research out of universities and research institutes where protocols exist to guarantee that the outcome of these studies is unbiased.
Most doctors, including myself, prefer branded products because the parent company is in a better position to guarantee quality and effectiveness than an unknown generic producer whose product may have the correct active ingredient but with unknown bioavailability and storage capability.
There are good generic companies, of course, and these are trusted as much as the originator by most of us.
There is no lack of doctors in Malta and I suggest to Mr Schembri and similarly minded people to shop around till they find one they trust – or else switch to alternative medicine.
Iro , isn’t the ‘choice’ of medicines strictly the pharmacist’s job?
If, for example, I have a headache the doctor should prescribe paracetamol and write down his diagnoses, the pharmacist who knows his subject more thoroughly than a GP would recommend to me a certain brand because there is this chemical which would make me feel better in my condition. This was the procedure forty years ago.
My personal doctor knows that I know what’s going on, so he just writes down the prescription and explains which is the active ingredient I need, but mishaps most probably happen on weekends we have to go to a health centre or a hospital , there’s no choice there.
@Harry Purdie
marcus flores: The German top-notch psychiatrist agreed with me fully. Being always above-board, she spelt the TRUTH out to her patients when the time was ripe. All she added, in speaking to me, was that, to protect her turf (AND HER PATIENTS), she had to mark time until it was the right moment to inform them of the root cause of their ill-health. We are all duty-bound to be lifelong TRUTH-seekers; but this age insists on living a lie. Get real means finding the truth and living it, or, tell me, witty boy, what is REAL?
@Charlie Bates.
Marcus Flores: Name-dropping is a very different beast from that of quoting the world’s topmost authorities, and to acknowledge the source. In matters of truth, if someone quotes Christ, whom I do my best to serve despite all my faults and my failings, their arguments will be as invincible as God Himself!
@JP Bonello.
Marcus Flores: INCIDIT IN FOVEAM QUAM FECIT springs to mind! Don’t write nonsense masquerading as knowledge. The three things you mention are not germane to the issue. Off-subject sir, and a load of high-flown bunkum to impress readers & to obfuscate the issue. Also to create the illusion (but not the fact) of having bowled me over. SORRY to disappoint. You might as well mention all the evils of history to tie yourself further into a knot. Don’t live a lie!
Fear of death AND fear of death: two different feelings, mon ami…..