U.S. HEALTH CARE DEBACLE: IT'S NOT JUST INSURANCE

From PBS's Bill Moyers Journal:

WARNING! ADS MAY HAVE HARMFUL SIDE EFFECTS

MELODY PETERSEN: A few years back, I kept getting information from a group called the PTSD Alliance. PTSD is Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. And one of the main messages of this group was that five percent of the American public suffered from PTSD. And this is estimate was millions and millions more than the government actually said suffered from this illness.

And later, I learned that this group wasn't actually what I thought it was. It was the creation of a public relations firm working for Pfizer to sell more Zoloft. In fact, it was staffed by the public relations firm. Its offices were the same address of the public relations firm.

BILL MOYERS: She found example after example of science compromised by marketing.

MELODY PETERSEN: You know, it's gone so far that some independent scientists are starting to view our medical literature as propaganda. I've learned that there are so many different ways for a study to be designed to get the data that will help you sell your drug. If you want to make it look more powerful than an older drug on the market, you give the volunteers in your trial the older drug at a dose that is too low to really help them so your drug looks better. If you want your drug to look safer than an older drug you boost the dose up of the older drug in the volunteers so they have more side effects. If you have one study that showed it worked, and one study showed it didn't, you publish the first study over and over again with the help of your advertising agency. And you don't publish the second one.

BILL MOYERS: Are we being deliberately misled?

MELODY PETERSEN: Yes.

BILL MOYERS: Intentionally?

MELODY PETERSEN: Yes, looking at documents from inside the drug companies, yes. I would say we're being misled deliberately.

Click here to watch or read the interview.

Right. Well, the entire point of advertising is to mislead, that is, to get people to buy things that they wouldn't ordinarily have wanted or even thought they needed. And that's the point this reporter, Melody Peterson, makes in the interview: the pharmaceutical industry is all about PR and marketing these days, rather than science and health--actually, Big Pharma is about the same thing that all corporations are about, increasing profits every quarter.

Of course, I fully understand that businesses must necessarily be about profits, but there are certain sectors of the economy where profit and the service or product provided are at odds with one another. If the blue paint you buy turns green after a few months, that's a problem, but you can always buy a different blue paint. If the cholesterol medicine you're using causes you to have a heart attack, you're fucked, forever.

In short, some businesses, like drug companies or health care in general, simply cannot be allowed to operate in the same way we allow, say, a soap company to operate. The stakes are much too high, but the right-wing dominated conventional wisdom for the past two decades, its laissez faire philosophy no-matter-what, has brought us to a place where it is fully legal, desirable, even, among the business elite, for the drug companies to lie to the public about the benefits and side effects of their products.

That's crazy, and there is no nuanced economic argument existing that could ever make it sane.

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