TOP 10 REASONS YOUR PRESCRIPTIONS COST SO MUCH

"TAX THE VERY WEALTHY TO MAKE EVERYONE HEALTHY!"
- VIGILANTE, SOZADEE, CA -


As you know, my last two posts dealt with those who are profiting immensely from our current exclusionary private health "care" system, highlighting those from the health insurance racket. But they are only part of the reason your health care costs so much. Another guilty industry is the pharmaceutical industry, which I highlight here.

Below is my Top 10 list of pharma CEOs whose obscenely high salaries help contribute to the high cost of medical treatment in this country. Just like their greedy profiteering counterparts in the health insurance industry, they are ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE. Unlike David Letterman's Top 10 lists, though, this one is not cute or humorous. In fact, it should make your blood boil. Remember, folks, that roughly 30% of the cost of expensive American drug company research and development is underwritten by YOU, the American taxpayer, in the form of subsidies. So how do these companies and their CEOs show YOU their gratitude for such support? By producing some of the medications in cheap labor countries overseas instead of employing American workers to make them here, by selling the very same drugs here, where these companies are headquartered, at TWICE the price they sell them to Canada, Australia, and other places in the world with so-called "socialized medicine" systems, and by rewarding themselves and their board members with piggishly high salaries at YOUR expense, that's how!

So here they are, the rip-offs who keep raising their prices at will and lining their pockets with YOUR money. I have included a photo of each so you'll know exactly who to verbally thrash should you ever encounter them in an empty elevator or a dimly-lit parking lot or ramp. I have their exorbitant 2008 salaries posted here (taken from a May 11, 2009 Fierce Pharmo report by Maureen Martino and Calisha Myers), as well as a few of the drugs/products their companies produce which do help you live and feel better, but which you also pay dearly for so that they can live luxuriously while you feel the financial pinch. These are the people who profit off of your sickness and misery. THEY ARE YOUR ENEMIES!




10. JOHN LECHLEITER
CEO, Eli Lilly
2008 salary: $ 13,000,000
(Cialis, Evista, plus a number of insulins for diabetics)


9. FRANK BALDINO
CEO, Cephalion
2008 salary: $ 14,5000,000
(Nuvigil, Fentora, Amrix, Gabitril)


8. JEFFREY KINDLER
CEO, Pfizer
2008 salary: $ 14,800,000
(Caduet, Xalatan, Benadryl, Lipitor, Viagra, Celebrex, Depo-Provera, Zoloft)


7. DAVID VASELLA
CEO, Novartis
2008 salary: $ 15,100,000
(Diovan, Lamisil, Lotrel, Exelon, Glivec, Exjade)


6. ROBERT PARKINSON
CEO, Baxter International
2008 salary: $ 16,000,000
(produces inhalation anesthesias, dialysis and cardiovascular products, and medicine delivery systems and units)


5. RICHARD CLARK
CEO, Merck
2008 salary: $ 19,900,000
(Zocor, Januvia, Zostavax, Vytorin)


4. JIM CORNELIUS
CEO, Bristol-Myers Squibb
2008 salary: $ 25,000,000
(Plavix, Abilify, Baraclude, Orencia)


3. BERNARD POUSSOT
CEO, Wyeth
2008 salary: $ 25,000,000
(Alavert, Premarin, Robitussin, Pinracil, Ambesol, Lumevax)


2. MILES WHITE
CEO, Abbott
2008 salary: $ 28,300,000
(Vicodin, Prevacid, Depacon, Humira, Leptos, Erythromycin)

And the number 1 reason your prescriptions cost so much:


BILL WELDON
CEO, Johnson & Johnson
2008 salary: $ 29,500,000
(Axert, Reopro, Doribax, One Touch diabetic blood glucose meters, Prezista, Doxil)


Remember these names, faces, and companies next time you must pay for an expensive prescription drug. These are the people who directly or indirectly cause many elderly on fixed incomes and millions of others low on money to have to sometimes choose between their product or food to eat. These are the people who want no price-lowering pressure to come from a government-run, public option health care plan. They would rather punp money into expensive ads designed to get you to suggest their particular product to your doctor than to have everyone able to afford medication. They would rather preserve their gigantic salaries than see everybody able to afford medical care. THEY ARE YOUR ENEMIES. For their primary interest is maintaining and increasing their profits, and your cure or relief from pain or misery is of a distant secondary importance.

UP NEXT: LEADERSHIP WE COULD USE TODAY!

BENEFICIARIES OF PRIVATE HEALTH CARE (Part II)

"TAX THE VERY WEALTHY TO MAKE EVERYONE HEALTHY!"
- VIGILANTE, SOZADEE, CA -






TOP, L TO R: Allen Wise; Ronald A. Williams
BOTTOM: Karen Ignagni; Michael McCalister


This is my second consecutive inlstallment on the true beneficiaries of private health care. They are the persons shown here, NOT YOU. If you're insured, they benefit with immense salaries YOU pay for through your premiums. They are the ones who directly or indirectly cause you to pay ever-higher premiums, deductibles, and co-pays. They are the ones who directly or indirectly have your coverage stop if it gets too expensive for their liking. They are the ones who directly or indirectly decide how long your hospital stay will be, and whether or not you will get the type of treatment, or the dosage of medication your doctor prescribes for you. They. too, are the ones who are attempting to prevent the passage of a universal or public option health care reform bill in Congress. If you're NOT insured, remember that they are the ones who have, directly or indirectly, excluded you or have made premiums so ungodly high you can no longer afford their "coverage". THEY ARE ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE. These are the Chief Executive Officers of some of America's largest health insurance companies. Three are an unholy trinity of profiteers who view their first priority as maximizing and increasing already gigantically huge profits for their companies, and their second priority as providing necessary health care for you. An additional CEO here is an aider, abettor, and parasite of these companies: she is the CEO of a very powerful Washington, D.C. firm raking in the cash lobbying for the big insurance companies against health care reform, especially against a public option. I will introduce this batch of profiteers to you now, and, as I did in part I of this installment, will provide details on their own exorbitant personal incomes, which you, the insured, are paying for. I hope you will remember these people next time you make an insurance premium payment, see a doctor, or go to the hospital. THEY ARE YOUR ENEMIES!


KAREN IGNAGNI
CEO, America's Health Insurance Plans (a lobbying firm).
Annual salary: figures unavailable for current salary or profits, but her 2005 salary was $ 1,236,422 according to CNNMoney, of February 15, 2006. You can bet your grundies that her salary has risen tremendously as the demand for her "services" has exponentially increased with the advent of Obama's push for health care reform, and she is one of the key health care lobbyists!
She opposes a windfall profits tax on health care insurers (naturally)!
------------
Some of her revealing quotes:
"It [an across the board cut in health care spending] doesn't have to happen right away, but having a commission, having a mechanism would give every stockholder group an incentive to create more productivity, to reduce unit costs and to create more efficiency."
(AHHH - SO STOCKHOLDERS AND CORPORATIONS ARE THE MAIN CONCERN HERE? WHAT ABOUT THE MILLIONS OF UNINSURED AND UNDERINSURED? AREN'T THEY IMPORTANT TOO? WHERE IS THEIR INSURANCE COVERAGE UNDER THIS DELAY YOU ARE RECOMMENDING, KAREN? SOUNDS LIKE THE OLD BUSHONOMICS ARGUMENT OF "LEAVE THE MARKET ALONE AND IT WILL POLICE AND FIX ITSELF." WE ALL KNOW WHAT A CROCK OF BULL THAT WAS)!
"It is hard to envision any kind of publicly sponsored option...that wouldn't rely on administered pricing...we are kidding ourselves if we think underpaying providers means cost-containment."
(WHAT DO YOU THINK YOUR PRECIOUS HEALTH INSURANCE HOSTS ARE DOING RIGHT NOW WHEN THEY DICTATE TO DOCTORS AND HOSPITALS WHAT THEY WILL PAY, KAREN)?
"It would be irresponsible to [have the insurance industry cut premiums by a set amount] unless we knew that cost would be cut by [that same] amount because premiums are driven by cost."
(PARROTING THE OLD INSURANCE COMPANY INFERENCE THAT DOCTORS AND NURSES ARE THE REASON FOR HIGH MEDICAL COSTS, EH, KAREN? WHAT ABOUT THE EXCESSIVE SALARIES OF INSURANCE COMPANY BOARDS, OR OF PARASITIC BLOODSUCKERS LIKE YOU LOBBYISTS, KAREN? ALL OF YOU MAKE MORE MONEY THAN MOST DOCTORS)!

ALLEN WISE
CEO, Coventry from 1996-2004, and again since January, 2009
2004 salary: $ 13,052,799
2004-2006 sales of stock: $ 73,695,702
2004-2006 stock options exercised: $ 14,402,564
Value of Hilton Head, SC home: $ 3,275,500

RONALD A. WILLIAMS
CEO, AETNA
2007-2008 salary totals: $ 47,300,112
Value of unexercised stock options: $ 194,496,797
In the top 10 of Forbes' $ 100,000,000 Club

MICHAEL McCALISTER
CEO, Humana
2004-2008 salary totals: $ 150,982,708
2006 stock options exercised: $ 22,294,710
Unexercised stock options: $ 60,865,194
Value of Park City, UT home: $ 6,978,380


It isn't just due to lobbyists that health care reform is having such a tough time getting through Congress. Oh no. William H.T. Bush, George W. Bush's uncle, and Susan Bayh, wife of blue dog Indiana Democratic Senator Evan Bayh, BOTH sit on the Board of WellPoint (whose profits last year totaled $ 2,491,000,000 - that's $ 2.491 BILLION - last year)!


There you have it, folks. THESE are the primary beneficiaries of our unjust and profit-driven private health "care" system, NOT YOU. There is no excuse for the excesses it contains, or for the fact that it now excludes 1 out of every 6.5 of us. It is rife with exploitation. The next time you encounter someone shouting out against a not-for-profit public option for health care in this country, or who wants to disrupt a Democratic Town Hall discussion on health care, direct them to this blog and this post and my previous one. Ask them, "is your health care better, or cheaper, or covers more for the same money than it did 5 or 10 years ago?" Ask them,"do you like paying multimillion dollar board member salaries every year so their salaries and profits can shoot through the roof while your own premiums, deductibles, and co-payments rise and your own wages stay the same or go down?" THEN have them tell me, as Republican Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona has said, that "health insurance doesn't need any more regulation" and that we do not need any health care reform.

This current corrupt system we have MUST be drastically changed! It is a profit maintenance system, not a health care system! Flood your elected representatives with letters, phone calls, and emails, and let them know you want this unjust and exclusionary practice of excessively profiteering off of people's illnesses to STOP! Do it NOW! Do it TMORROW! Do it NEXT WEEK! And DON'T GIVE UP THE FIGHT!

THE PARTY'S OVER, BOYS!

"It always seemed strange to me that the things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first, they love the produce of the second."
- John Steinbeck -

"Landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed."
-Karl Marx -

"The man who has won millions at the cost of his conscience is a failure."
- B. C. Forbes -

Corporate greed continues unabated, but at long last signs are emerging that the party may finally be over for corporate America's greediest and most irresponsible pigs. In the past day or two, President Obama (with echoed cries from enlightened members of Congress like Sen. Claire McCaskill [D-MO] and Rep. Elijah Cummings [D-MD]) has come down hard on corporate executives' grossly excessive salaries and bonuses as well as their lavish expenditures after receiving federal taxpayer bailout money to rescue the very businesses these people have helped lead to huge operating losses. Not since JFK, in his battle against the steel companies collectively raising prices simultaneously ("My father always told me all businessmen were sons of bitches"), has a President publicly spoken so boldly against the greed of corporate America. It is a refreshing and long-overdue sound. Obama's recommendation that corporate CEOs whose companies have received TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) funds limit their annual salaries to no more than $500,000 per year is not at all unreasonable. Especially so, when you consider the President himself, the man responsible for our well-being and security, and the one who runs our government, is paid only $400,000 per year.

Corporate executives have come to develop a disgusting arrogance and sense of entitlement in recent times. As labor union strength has seriously and dramatically declined over the past three decades (ever since Ronald Reagan broke their backs during the 1981 PATCO strike), corporate executive pay has shot up like a Mars rocket and so have their bonuses. Meanwhile, these execs have succeeded in freezing workers' wages, cutting employee benefits, laying many workers off, and exporting millions of their jobs overseas to cheap foreign labor markets. To add insult to injury, the worst President in history, George W. Bush, even gave these wealthy, overpaid fat cats huge tax cuts several times during his terms in office. With government regulations eased through heavy conservative Republican pressure over the past 10 years, it is no wonder these execs have developed their sense of entitlement and godlike invincibility. Consider these recent actions undertaken after bailout money was granted them:

- AIG, who received $85 BILLION in taxpayer rescue funds, sent 70 of its "top performers" on a $440,000 luxury resort junket.
- WELLS FARGO BANKS, who were awarded $25 BILLION in TARP funds, had rented out 12 nights' stay at two of the most expensive hotels in Las Vegas for a casino junket for its elites until the move became public knowledge and the shit hit the fan. I might add that the cheap bastards at Wells Fargo feel it necessary to charge $5 per payroll check drawn ON their bank to anyone not holding an account there wanting to cash said check AT that bank. Nothing like preying on the little folk so the big guys can have their expensive getaways (and the CEO can be paid, yet hardly "earn", a $12 million salary)!
- CITIGROUP, recipient of $45 BILLION in bailout money, spent an estimated $10 million to sponsor the Super Bowl. For this money, its guests (executive, employee, or otherwise---they won't reveal who attended) got luxury suite seats at the game and admittance to extravagant parties. Citigroup also paid extra to host an outside-the-stadium "NFL Fan Experience" display. But the extravagance doesn't stop there, folks. Oh no! AFTER the bailout money was obtained, Citigroup's piggish execs pushed through approval for the purchase of a $50 MILLION corporate jet from France! Thankfully, pressure from President Obama and the media forced them to withdraw this ridiculous and unnecessary purchase.
- MORGAN STANLEY, who got $10 BILLION in TARP money, and who laid off 5,000 employees last year, recently held a lavish 3 day conference for its esteemed guests at a posh resort. Company executives defended their actions by stating they had obtained a discount rate of only $400 per night per room per person. But as Rep. Elijah Cummings of MD points out, "...for most people in my block, that would be half of a monthly mortgage payment, $400."

The list of corporate excesses could go on and on. This behavior is pervasive throughout the big business community. Executives are rewarded with "golden parachutes", millions of dollars at retirement, which they receive even if fired, and even if their poor performance has cost the company millions of dollars. These same people, almost to a man or woman, cringe at the very thought of giving their employees long overdue, signifigant wage increases. They oppose welfare for much the same reason, believing the recipients will develop a sense of entitlement which will adversely affect their performance or work ethic. Regrettably, this very sense of entitlement has come to fruition---among the execs THEMSELVES. They have lavished themselves with luxury for so long, and to such great excess, that they have effectively lost touch with reality. They have become blind to the needs of their own employees, their own communities, and to the entire country as well.

These fools claim that such gargantuan salaries and perks are needed to attract the best executives. Yet, in practice, this same philosophy is never applied to lesser employees. With workers, the idea is to offer as little as can possibly be gotten away with. These executive fools tell their employees that taking or doing a job only for the money is a bad thing. Yet what do THEY do? It is obvious to see the executive class has become a collection of badly corrupted and misguided ineffectual hypocrites. Even their logic is flawed, as many of these "best executives" have miserably failed their companies, their stockholders, their EMPLOYEES, and even their country and its TAXPAYERS at large, yet they continue to get exorbitant salaries.

President Obama is absolutely correct when he says it is shameful to reward failure with exorbitant salaries, as has been the practice in many of our modern-day corporations. They (or their surrogate Republican congresspersons) will scream and piss and moan at Obama's $500,000 maximum annual salary directive. But they will all be ethically, morally, and totally wrong in doing so.

The party's over, boys, and you've imbibed way too much at our expense. You'll try to find loopholes and ways to get back to your vastly over-compensated state of being, and you may even succeed. Ignorant and self-centered cutthroats like yourselves usually do. But your success won't last for long. This time, we won't let it!

CORPORATE GREED KILLS!

According to a briefing given reporters by Michael Rogers, Director of Regional Investigations at the Food and Drug Administration, a peanut butter processing plant in Blakely, GA has been identified as the source of a salmonella outbreak that has sickened more than 500 people and was responsible for 8 deaths across 43 states and Canada. The plant, owned by Peanut Corp. of America out of Lynchburg, VA, had been cited numerous times throughout 2007 and 2008 for salmonella contamination, but kept shipping product anyway. The FDA found that the plant's manufacturing conditions differed significantly from good manufacturing practice and had "an adverse effect upon the quality of that product, making it adulterated." In fact, once the plant had received the FDA's lab findings, the company contracted with other, presumably hand-picked, labs, which found no evidence of bacterial contamination, so, getting the results it wanted, the company happily kept ship[ping infected product. This approach reminds me of my elderly father's folly regarding high blood pressure. His doctor told him on a visit that he had borderline high blood pressure and prescribed medication for it. My father abjors medications and resists them like the plague. Ever the skeptic, he went out and bought a home blood pressure measuring device. I watched him one day recently, rapidly taking three or four successive readings in a row, not bothering to properly recalibrate the device before each reading. I noted he had written down three differnt readings. When I asked him what he was doing, he said, "i'm looking for the best reading!" So then I said to him, "Do you want the BEST reading, or the ACCURATE one?" He looked at me like I was half nuts and exclaimed indignantly, "Why, the BEST one, of course!" My father can be excused, kind of, because his actions affected only him and he's nearly 87. Peanut Corp. of America CANNOT be excused for what they have done to the innocent public, for their actions were based on greed and negligence.

I have been a Type I diabetic, since 1957, diagnosed just after my 3rd birthday. I have injected insulins daily all these years since then, and joke with my friends that I am the only human pin cushion they know. One of the types of insulin I use is made only by the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly & Co. I have used their products faithfully for more than 50 years. Now that I am temporarily (I hope) out of work and can no longer afford health insurance, I am finding out just how ungodly expensive my meds have become. Just the other day, I was shocked to pay $109 plus change for a bottle of this made-by-Lilly-only insulin purchased at a pharmacy known nationally for its low prices. But I was horrified to learn only yesterday that I could have purchased this VERY SAME product out of Canada for only $43.25 per bottle, less than HALF what I had just paid here in the USA! I resent the fact that Eli Lilly, who has consistently shown great profit in recent years, has a CEO paying himself more than $7 million per year (and a board of directors also exceeedingly well paid), who obviously feels it essential to charge the dealers and citizens of their own country MORE THAN DOUBLE what they charges those in Canada. This, too, CANNOT be excused, for ANY reason!

I once knew a guy in college who was an avid Socialist. With great zeal he used to cheerily urge fellow students to sign up for Young Socialist, a publication which had been put out by the Socialist Workers Party, or attend the latest Socialist rally or protest. I saw him smilingly exclaim literally hundreds of times his favorite slogan: "Human needs before profits!" Having witnessed the demoralizing aspect of the Soviet Union's forced dictatorship over the years, I gradually abandoned my youthful, like-minded idealism to favor instead welfare-state capitalism. I recognized that profit was essential to the capitalistic system and that it was a good motivator. But then came the greed of the Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II years, and I began to question again how capitalism has been practiced and abused in this country.

As I think back to Sarah Palin and John McCain last fall, and John Boner (ooops, Boehner), and others today on the far right, corporate Republican, Chamber of Commerce scope, all condemning socialism and socialists as evil, I really wonder. Their heroes in that corporate Republican world are clearly ripping off most of the population, and corporate greed is indeed killing Americans as well as causing them unnecessary financial stress. Who really is the more evil of the two: Socialists, or the corporate bandits? Those Republicans saying the former should tell that to the families and friends of those who died from tainted peanut butter, or to millions of diabetics like me who are getting screwed by Eli Lilly. But, Republicans, we won't be listening to you.

WHY AMERICAN HEALTH CARE COSTS SO MUCH

What we Americans are paying for health care is grand larceny! Costs keep shooting up far faster than inflation and at a rate much higher than do American salaries. As with last summer's ridiculously high $4 per gallon gasoline prices, the main cause is corporate greed, particularly in the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries. Their greed is an indefensible abuse of the marketplace, all the more so at a time when Americans' wages have been stagnating or in decline for years now, and food, energy, and almost all other costs have been on a steady rise.

Health insurance providers love to blame the high cost of health care on doctors, but this is a dishonest claim designed to focus attention away from their own most definite contribution. According to an industry survey done by Merritt Hawkins & Associates, in 2007, 81.29% of all primary care physicians made $225,000 or less annually (and only 8.9% made in excess of $300,000). Surgeons and specialists, of course, drew higher salaries, but their numbers are smaller than those of primary care physicians. And yes, all of these doctors have well-paid staffs including nurses, medical technicians, therapists, x-ray technicians, etc., but their salaries are all much less than that of physicians or surgeons. Not only that, but health insurance companies have large staffs themselves. Now $225,000 or $300,000 may seem like a gigantic amount to a person earing only $25,000 or $50,000 per year, but the number seems less gargantuan when one considers the many years of expensive higher education put in by physicians as well as the colossally high malpractice insurance rates they must pay. So this attempt by insurance companies to use physicians as whipping boys for the high and ever-rising cost of health care is a deliberate deceit.

Now that we have exposed the myth of the massively-overpaid physicians, let's look at the humungous salaries the health insurance and pharmaceutical company CEOs "earn" (steal?). According to an August 23, 2007 WEB MD blog called "Nad About Medicine," in an article entitled "CEO Compensation: Who Said Health Care is in a Financial Crisis?", in 2005 the CEO of United Health Group was paid a staggering $124.8 MILLION, the CEO of Forest Labs got $92.1 MILLION, Merck's CEO got $37.8 MILLION, Aetna's CEO received $22.1 MILLION, Becton-Dickinson's got $10 MILLION, and Eli Lilly's got $7.2 MILLION. Keep in mind, these are only CEO salaries and DON'T include Senior VPs', VPs', or other board members' compensation rates, which are also extremely high. You'll be guaranteed to grab your wallet or pocketbook in terror and puke green if you go to The Industry Reader's website at http://www.theindustryreader.com/index.cfm?account=radar&page=Healthplan_Executive_Co . Here you'll see that, in 2007, the top 6 health plan boards paid themselves a whopping $277,998,793. That same year, the entire Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches of our government cost us, in comparison, only $95,974,600. Damn few health insurance board members have ever directly saved a life or eased someone's pain. So why should these pigs and their counterparts in the pharmaceutical industry be paid salaries in the MILLIONS while the infinitely better-educated and more valuable physicians be paid only in the hundreds of THOUSANDS? This is unjustifiable, immoral, and we are most definitely not getting our money's worth from these vastly overpaid, leveraged parasite middlemen!

Clearly, with health insurance providers and pharmaceutical companies swimming in mounds of money and excessively profiting off of human illness and suffering, this setup is in need of radical reform. The piggish executives live lives of absolute luxury, while 1 in 7 of us cannot even afford health insurance, and the prospect of cancer treatments or major surgery spells certain loss of property and life savings. This is blatantly wrong and thoroughly evil. Hospitals (even so-called non-profit ones) have become giant money vacuums sucking the public dry. Doctors are being squeezed by health insurance bandits, who are now effectively dictating terms of health care for purposes of profit by cherry-picking whom and what they will cover, how often, and how much. Regrettably, the John Edwards health care plan will not be adopted. It would have truly provided universal health care for all citizens and would have closely resembled plans long in use all over Europe and Canada. It would have also booted the self-serving, profiteering insurance company pigs out of the picture altogether. Instead, we will most likely end up with a version of the Obama plan, which will still be far better than what we have today, but it will unfortunately allow the insurance parasites to still sit at the planning and operations tables. So it will fall short of the mark we truly need to hit. Oh well, I guess 10% of something is better than 100% of nothing...

One parting thought: The next time you are at your doctor's and feel like grumbling at the $15, $20, or $25 co-pay you must pay, just remember that your doctor, just like you, is also getting screwed by the profiteering insurance companies!