Open letter to Senator Klobuchar regarding insulin prices

by Glen Wallace

Hi Senator Klobuchar, I just saw a feature on the KSTP news featuring some comments by you about the recent run-up in the price of insulin recently. I believe an ideal solution is one you and your colleagues on capitol hill have not even considered legislatively. The solution to spikes in the price of pharmaceuticals and medical devices would be for the government to take on the production and distribution of those pharmaceuticals and medical devices at cost. Currently there seems to be a habit of thinking among healthcare policy makers that traps them into assuming that the only option to getting a needed healthcare product to the patient is by way of the commercial markets.

But there shouldn't be any barriers to the federal government taking on the role of the production and distribution of at least the medicines and devices that are outside of patent protection. And keep in mind many of the most notorious recent cases of price spikes occurred with products that were already outside of patent protection -- including, but not limited to insulin and the epipen.

Also, there is a long standing precedent of the federal government owning and operating the means of production and distribution of a product -- the US Government Publishing Office, also known as the Government Printing Office, has been around for many decades manufacturing, printing, publishing and selling to individuals and institutions everything from books to pamphlets to posters and just about everything printable in between.

Therefore, there should be nothing stopping the Senate and House from mandating the opening of a Government Pharmaceutical and Medical Devices Office to bypass the market and get the needed healthcare products directly to the patients at the mere cost of production.

For years now I have been seeing hearings and statements from representatives such as yourself ranging from scolding to pleading of manufacturers to try and keep their prices down. I ask you; who's in charge here? When I hear only talk from you in the form of scolding and pleading to some Big Pharma executive, it sure looks like it is the Big Pharma companies that are the ones in charge. I thought we were a country of, by and for the people. If they will not bring the prices down, then we the people should engage that American can-do spirit, and make those products ourselves.

And this could be just the beginning -- we could start building a medical system that is entirely patient driven instead of where it is now in being market driven. I think people that go into the medical profession do it first and foremost because they care about people. With a patient driven, patient based system we can have as the primary decision makers, about what medical drug or device goes into production and their prices, be those medical professionals that care about the patients and not some bean counting CEO with only a legal fiduciary responsibility to some distant shareholders.

Referenced news story about insulin prices featuring Klobuchar comments

The misguidance of charities funding medical research

By Glen Wallace

In a Minneapolis Star Tribune article, hope is presented that activating a naturally occurring molecule found in cancer cells called p53 will provide hope that a cure for a wide range of cancers could be found.  The p53 molecule is inducing the desired result in cancer cells of a phenomena known as apoptosis, or programmed cell death.  A number of herbs have shown promise in inducing apoptosis but pharmaceutical companies are not interested in whole herbs because whole herbs cannot be patented.  If something cannot be patented then the drug company has no hope of reaping the monopoly profits from the drug once it is brought to market.  And the only reason a drug company is going to manufacture and sell a drug is if it is going to be profitable for the drug company. 

While there are many charities that are non-profit trying to raise money to find cures for cancer there is no such thing as a non-profit drug company that sells a cancer treatment.  Think about it -- where does a patient not in a research trial that is receiving drug treatment for cancer get those drugs from?  The patient buys those drugs from a for-profit drug company that decided it is in their best financial interests to sell those drug to patients.  But the non-profit charities continue to make the assumption that first, the drug companies will only look at the treatments with the best potential for a cure, and second, if a cure is found then the drug companies will automatically manufacture and sell the cure to patients.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  First, drug companies only spend money researching what they can hope to make a profit from and second, even if the research is very promising they will not manufacture and sell any drug at all, no matter how promising it is for the patient, if the drug company concludes they will not profit from the drug.  And in a mainstream medical setting,  if a drug is not being sold, then the patient will not  receive the drug. 

So when a charity says they are raising money for a cure, even if they have the best of intentions, what they really are doing is raising money to help the drug companies find their next money maker.  As a result, we can only hope and pray that a cure for cancer is found that is more profitable than the current chemotherapy treatment model -- because given how our current medical system is set up, that is our only hope for a cure in the FDA and AMA approved mainstream medical world.

Or, we can stop making the unsafe assumption that there is this great synergistic relationship between capitalism and good medicine.  If anyone in medicine were to step back and look at the medical field as a whole and apply just a little of the same scrutiny to the whole paradigm that they do to individual treatments, they would quickly discover that the current capitalistic model of medicine is inherently flawed.  A complete paradigm shift is needed where it will be the drug companies that have to hope and pray that the next treatment or cure will be profitable for them because the new system will put the patient rather than profits first.  But creating such a paradigm shift will not be easy.  There are many very powerful interests, including multinational pharmaceutical corporations, that are vested in maintaining the capitalism and medicine synergy illusion within the public consciousness.  But that illusion can be broken by persistently educating and spreading memes about the truth of the current flawed medical research and treatment paradigm.  The current system does not exist due to any law of physics but was rather created by fallible humans and as such we humans can change it for the better.