Healthcare going forward

[gsdx]

Drug advertising should be banned in USA as well. It is almost legal drug dealing. Considering how deceiving the commercials are, listing off the side effects in a very quick manner while showing you pretty pictures of a healthy person.

There is an adult swim short movie of a drug advertisement. It is pretty disturbing but drives the point of what is wrong with these commercials.

For anyone who doubts that drug advertising is necessary:

The next time you are in a drug store or pharmacy, go to the pharmacy counter and take a look behind the counter. See all those shelves? See all the thousands and thousands of bottles of prescription medication? See that room at the side with all those shelves with even thousands more bottles of prescription medications?

Now, think about how many advertisements you've seen for them.

The only companies which advertise are the ones where a dozen other companies are selling the same product with a different name, most of which replace existing products which don't have a list of side effects. Got heartburn? Get a glass of water, stir in a spoonful of baking soda, and drink.

But 'no'. Because of the advertising, people must have the expensive drugs because the drug companies tell them that they must have their drugs. Sounds like something people do in back alleys, except they're exchanging money for a little plastic bag.

It's really legalised drug dealing with debilitating side effects, or even death.

 

[Stardreamer]

So Trump is reiterating his promises for the Health Care this week:
Everyone will have insurance coverage available
Federal health care agencies WILL negotiate prices with drug companies to bring prices down (sorry Ben this is thing for the Republicans)
Lower deductibles
Affordable
Better than the ACA

 

[DantheManFL]

So Trump is reiterating his promises for the Health Care this week:
Everyone will have insurance coverage available
Federal health care agencies WILL negotiate prices with drug companies to bring prices down (sorry Ben this is thing for the Republicans)
Lower deductibles
Affordable
Better than the ACA

 

[gsdx]

Everyone will have insurance coverage available

EVERYone?? Even the (gasp) illegals?

 

[Kulindahr]

Companies always have to recover costs by sales to consumers. How else recover costs? How stay in business? You guys have no concept of business or economics, do you?
The other purpose of advertising is to educate the public as to the existence, purpose, and potential side effects of drugs. You know from the ads that all drugs have potential side effects. Trial lawyers love to bring lawsuits over side effects claiming the company should have advised as to the the side effects.

You have a low comprehension of reality here. Do you really think that if companies stop advertising to patients then doctors will stop writing prescriptions?

The ONLY reason to advertise directly to patients is to get them to try to force doctors to make a decision that the patients are n ot qualified to judge. In other words, it's a con game. It is thus immoral.

And commercials have almost nothing to do with deterring lawyers from filing lawsuits about side effects. I can't get a prescription handed to me at the store or sold to me by mail without signing that I have read and understood the side effects.

 

[Kulindahr]

What would have been the bill (in equivalent-to-US-dollars) if they had been entirely uninsured in Canada, and gotten entirely a la carte care? For example, if she was a U. S. woman who had the premature baby in Canada and, of course, not covered by the national healthcare.


Not necessarily so. When I had the kidney cancer in 2003 and had my kidney taken out, I saw *ALL* of the bills initially, because it took the insurance company more than four months to start paying ANYTHING. I had one of those total-piece-of-shit insurance policies which left me paying slightly more than one-half of the $27,000+ that the ordeal was billed for...and the main part of it, the hospital bill, wasn't paid until after five months...and within a week of the promised date for my bill to go to Collection, which would have of course added thousands of dollars to it.

Here, even when you do everything right, you can be fucked.


Even HIM?? What the fuck?

This country is so screwed.

And it will remain screwed until we get back to basic principles and stop granting fake rights to inanimate entities such as corporations. NO entity except living, breathing individual human citizens and legal residents have any political rights, because it;s impossible to have rights if you're not a living, breathing human being.

No corporate donations. No lobbyists.

The longer things go this way, the more inclined I am to agree with the folks who believe citizens should be able to own tanks and howitzers -- though if it keeps on, the heads of corporations are going to be hunted down by drones with C4 or such. Maybe if a few thousand get killed by people who understand what it means to be civilized there will finally be some who are willing to behave as though they're civilized.

 

[Kulindahr]

its important to remember that Trump has said that he wants to be able to negotiate drug prices, something democrats have never been strong on. if they had, the obamacare issue wouldnt be nearly the political football that it has become.

also let us not forget, 14 senate democrats, including my own, just voted against the sanders amendment to lower drug prices.

now Trump may have some political success because corporate democrats failed to act when they had the chance.

Don't they understand that allowing some people to negotiate drug prices but not others is inherently unconstitutional? Private sector insurance companies negotiate bulk prices; if the government agencies can't, that's inequality before the law.

 

[Kulindahr]

Then it does not support your claim that canadian drug companies are very profitable without advertising in Canada.

Did you read your own links? It's failing because it isn't doing research to turn out new products, its business model is buy little companies and jack up the prices. While that will make quarterly reports look good for a while, in the long run it's not a viable strategy.

 

[KaraBulut]

The only companies which advertise are the ones where a dozen other companies are selling the same product with a different name, most of which replace existing products which don't have a list of side effects. Got heartburn? Get a glass of water, stir in a spoonful of baking soda, and drink.

Rethink for moment which medications are being advertised.

It's almost always the medications that require that you take them for chronic illnesses.

Depressed? Take Abilify daily.
HIV? Take Truvada daily.
Bladder problems? Myrbetriq, daily.

There's few ads for medications that cure or that are taken for a short duration.

 

[Kulindahr]

Legitimate prescription drugs do not need advertising.

Three different doctors I know believe that the only reason for commercials by pharmaceuticals is to make people dissatisfied with generics -- a view they volunteered; I didn't ask.

 

[Benvolio]

Don't they understand that allowing some people to negotiate drug prices but not others is inherently unconstitutional? Private sector insurance companies negotiate bulk prices; if the government agencies can't, that's inequality before the law.

Very silly. The government would be choosing not to negotiate.

 

[Kulindahr]

There used to be a fairly common practice in advertising where they wouldn't even describe what the drug was for. They invariably showed people doing nothing in particular and then a voice-over would say, "Ask your doctor about Brand X." They don't do that anymore. The doctors were doing the advertising for the drug company, and the doctors weren't even paid for it. Are there still free samples?

Oh, yes, there are still free samples.

Every single time my psych docs have found it necessary to switch me to a different med, I get four to six weeks worth of one free while they see if it works right for me. I once went four months on free meds that way; the third one did the trick with no side effects.

It's actually one way companies help avoid lawsuits over side effects; a doctor can give free samples so the patient isn't paying for a med that hasn't been found acceptable in terms of side effects.

 

[Kulindahr]

Drug advertising is really disease advertising. You have a bored housewife sitting alone, she feels like nobody cares.
She sees a commercial and in it they show another woman being catered to and fawned over by a person acting as a dr. and his staff, they almost walk her out to her car and open the door for her.

"Maybe, that's what I need" and off she goes.
I say she because women seem to be far more concerned and susceptible then men. I hesitate to say too much as I know we have some Drs. on JUB.
But I am married to a woman, finally when i had to take over her medical care we (the new drs. and myself) started to take her off of some meds that she didn't seem to need.

At one time she was on over 10 prescriptions, now only 4, one of them is insulin and that has been adjusted to where she know takes half of what she was on.

I used to bang my head against the wall when she would have stomach pains and be sent to a gastroenterologist for an endoscopy and then i would find that she was on 1000 mgs. of Naproxen daily
It was a prescription dose.
My point is that some pills cause more problems than they cure, then instead of stopping that med. another one is given to treat the symptoms of the first. And, on it goes.

On another occasion she developed an infection on her leg, the dr. put her on a 1o day course of antibiotics. After 10 days the infection spread, so she was sent to a dermatologist who said it was just a regular infection, nothing special. Another 10 days of antibiotics, (these were all name brands and cost more), 10 days later the infection was worse.
I had tried to stay out of it, her dr. and I didn't like each other much. Finally i looked at her leg up close and saw no indication of her body fighting this infection.

I told the wife to ask her dr. if she was on any meds. that would interfere with her immune system. It turned out that she was on an immune suppressant because she has ulcerative colitis. She should only have been on them for a certain amount of time but her dr. kept refilling her rx. She stopped the pill and after one more course of antibiotics her leg had cleared up.

To be quite honest, we are as careless as hell in the USA about pills. I am 64 and am on one rx. for epilepsy, i hate taking that as it makes me grumpy and slows down my thought process.

According to two of my doctors, one of the big areas of research that is desperately lacking is drug interaction. The only good thing in that area right now is that there are web sites for doctors that give every known interaction in medical detail. But almost all of the information is just between two medications; there is very little at all about interactions between three or more.

This is one of the big problems with having multiple doctors: if one doesn't know what meds you're getting from another, you can be handed a debilitating or deadly interaction without anyone knowing until the effects hit.

My approach is to make sure all my doctors know what all the others are prescribing, and I ask each of them to review the list twice a year in case there has been anything new learned.

 

[gsdx]

Rethink for moment which medications are being advertised.

It's almost always the medications that require that you take them for chronic illnesses.

The only commercials I see are on American channels, and I watch very little of that. People's Court is mostly lawyer and class action lawsuits. Judge Judy is much the same. Only Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy!, and I usually don't pay attention to commercials.

I've never seen commercials for depression or HIV or even bladder problems. The most common commercials I see are ones for heartburn, weight loss (those Lipitor commercials should be investigated and then banned), or artificial insulin for diabetics.

 

[Kulindahr]

Drug advertising is really disease advertising.

My doctor friend -- captain of our cross-country team when we were in high school -- says he daily gets patients asking to be examined for a particular affliction because they saw symptoms described on a drug commercial. So far the largest number in a year that actually had a problem was three! And he says those would have been caught in a regular check-up anyway.

What the advertising really did for those patients was cost them time and the co-pay for the visits, and use up their doctor's time finding nothing.

 

[smokeshadow]

Well, the Donald certainly has thrown a big monkey wrench into conservatives plans for repealing and (but probably not) replacing the PPACA. The Donald, in a recent interview, stated that the health care plan that he's working on (RIGHT. . .snark ) will offer universal coverage and lower premiums. Even if he is pulling all this out of his ass, because he's the conservative standard bearer, their congress critters are now going to be saddled with two things that conservatives hate.

This is just going to get more and more interesting

https://www.washingtonpost.com/amph...republican-effort-to-repeal-obamacare?ref=yfp

 

[Benvolio]

The only commercials I see are on American channels, and I watch very little of that. People's Court is mostly lawyer and class action lawsuits. Judge Judy is much the same. Only Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy!, and I usually don't pay attention to commercials.

I've never seen commercials for depression or HIV or even bladder problems. The most common commercials I see are ones for heartburn, weight loss (those Lipitor commercials should be investigated and then banned), or artificial insulin for diabetics.

Lipitor is not for weight loss.

 

[gsdx]

Lipitor is not for weight loss.

My apologies. Lipitor is for cholesterol.

Lipozene is (supposedly) for weight loss.

 

[Kulindahr]

Very silly. The government would be choosing not to negotiate.

The government is not allowed that choice -- it is required by the Constitution to treat all citizens equally. The government can only "choose" to not negotiate by passing a law, and the moment they do so they have engaged in unconstitutional division of citizens before the law.

 

[KaraBulut]

I've never seen commercials for depression or HIV or even bladder problems.

For some reason, these commercials seem to be obsessed with things following women around- pills, leaky bladders. And the side effects warnings are always blurted out quickly because they're really scary:

Some of the actors in commercials have a cult following like CariDee English: