Re: Big Pharma: The truth about the drug industry.
In your July 18 Perspective section, author Marcia Angell claims that marketing drives prescription medicine overuse and inflates prices. That claim just doesn't withstand scrutiny.
For the last four years drug-price increases have been in line with that of overall medical care. And while the writer is critical of brand medicine advertising, she neglects to tell readers that generics make up more of the market in the United States (50 percent of prescriptions) than in other countries and that a recent, independent study by RAND Health concluded that medicines are underused across a broad range of conditions. Additionally, the Federal Trade Commission has stated that consumers benefit from direct-to-consumer advertising with little, if any, evidence that such advertising increases prescription drug prices.
Innovative medicines are revolutionizing medical care. They keep patients healthier and independent, and reduce the need for more expensive services like surgery and long hospitalizations. For example, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) are used to treat diseases of the central nervous system. Patient response to treatment can vary. Having more than one medication in this drug class allows physicians to customize treatments for individual patients and minimize side-effects and adverse reactions. Dr. Angell thinks this is needless. Patients would disagree.
Solutions for making drugs more available to patients exist. Most important among them: better insurance coverage for drugs. The Medicare drug benefit is a big step in this direction. Meanwhile, company patient assistance programs are helping millions of low-income Americans - the neediest patients - get the medicines they need. These programs can be accessed through www.helpingpatients.org
-- Alan F. Holmer, president and CEO, Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, Washington, D.C.
A pervasive influence
Re: Big Pharma: The truth about the drug companies.
Thank you for reprinting Marcia Angell's article on the pharmaceutical industry and its stranglehold on our pocketbooks. Americans need to be aware of the major influence this industry has on the education of our 800,000 physicians. From medical schools' reliance on drug company research funding, through the medical journals with page after page of drug advertising, to the conferences where doctors are brought up to date with the latest patent medicines, to the attractive army of "detail" people hauling samples into offices by the ton, drug companies make sure there is no room for more natural, cheaper alternatives.
Could this be why nutrition is not a part of the curriculum? Why all we hear about vitamins is their (extremely unusual) potential side effects? Why no one knows that medical care, properly administered (according to Journal of the American Medical Association) is the third leading cause of death in America? Why there is no funding for exploring causation in disease, only how to treat the problem once it has occurred?
The real revolution in health care will come when we put money into prevention and unraveling the underlying causes of illness, and people get back the power to heal themselves! Just say no to drugs!
-- Carol L. Roberts, M.D., president-elect, American Holistic Medical Association, Brandon
Health care issue is waiting
Two recent articles in the Times on the U.S. health care crisis (U.S. health care system terminally ill, by David S. Broder, July 16, and Big Pharma: The truth about the drug companies, by Marcia Angell, July 18) were excellent. Both challenged us to radically transform the U.S. health care system.
Broder quoted Republican Senate Majority leader Bill Frist, who is a physician. Frist told the National Press Club that he felt the American health care system is urgently in need of basic overhaul.
Angell is also a physician and has written a book on the large drug companies that she feels are in need of "fundamental reform." Angell says the pharmaceutical industry is taking the American public for a ride, and there will be no reform "without an aroused and determined public to make it happen."
With so many U.S. citizens unable to afford access to health care through affordable health insurance, especially the working poor, and seniors unable to afford Medicare supplemental insurance to help pay for prescription drugs, our country has an election year issue intimately connected to another issue: the national economy.
The chairman of General Motors was quoted in the Broder article as saying, "It is well beyond time for all of us to put partisan politics behind us and get together to address this health care crisis."
It will be interesting to see how the presidential candidates propose to help solve this national problem. As David Broder ends his article: "Whoever is president will find the issue waiting for him."
-- Sister Carol Stovall, SSJ, member, Tampa Bay Healthcare Collaborative Advocacy Committee, St. Petersburg
Making light of filth
Re: Keep your laws off my sex jokes, July 18.
Here is another of Robyn Blumner's rants about First Amendment protection of speech, no matter how hateful, vile or offensive.
How I wish Blumner would occasionally apply her considerable legal and journalistic talents in discussion of our right to protection against the assault of pornography, libel and slander, violation of privacy, also our public duty to arrest the tide of filth that increasingly coarsens the public discourse. This column does the opposite: It treats lightly, almost humorously, the filth we see and hear on TV as "tawdry banter," "tasteless, juvenile stuff," "bad taste," "ugly sentiments and potty mouth."
What we see and hear daily in the "entertainment" media goes far beyond such benign description, beyond bad taste - it cheapens and degrades us all. Is this how we want our children to see themselves?
-- Joseph H. Francis, St. Petersburg
No nanny government
Re: Censorship's elusive line, Let parents, not government, be censors and Keep your laws off my sex jokes, July 18.
I know, I know. The ugliness of the jokes Robyn Blumner cites is repellent to many of us. Further, they are so primitive as to make one think of a group of nasty little children. One recoils in disgust. And one rolls one's eyes at some of the "adult situations" and "frank sex talk" in TV programs. Then there are all those glossy ads for beer and liquor on TV and in magazines (with the fine print urging customers to "drink responsibly"). One thinks of the eager teens yearning to be sophisticated and carefree, just like the good-looking young people pictured.
Is censorship the answer? Do people clamoring to make all this (and more) verboten really want to live in a country where a nanny government decides what is and what isn't good for us? All too soon, this "righteous" overseeing would spread to books, to magazines, to art. And one is overcome by a terrifying thought: If censorship is established against ideas and words of others, can it not eventually get around to ideas and words of mine?
Certainly we have the right, each of us, to be offended by the art, the writing, the performances of others. We have the right to complain, to pass on to our children our values, our tastes, explaining them carefully. What we do not have is the right to demand that everyone conform to our opinions. By the same token, no government should have the authority to define for us just what "obscenity" is... or, for that matter, what "right" is. (In the broad sweep of history, what government has been infallible? The Salem witch trials were legal in colonial times. The Holocaust was legal in Nazi Germany.) It behooves us to be very vigilant!
-- Abigail Ann Martin, Brandon
Propaganda in disguise
Re: My first (and last) time with O'Reilly, July 18.
In this election year, political debates again tend to inure us to exaggerations, rudeness, reckless invectives, platitudes and downright blatant lies that perniciously worm their way into our folklore. David Cole's article could not have been timelier when it shined a spotlight on the larger aspects of the TV political propaganda masquerading as free speech.
The article made us think of the insidious, corrosive, indeed dangerous implications of the freewheeling chaos on TV and radio (though the latter was not implicated in Cole's article). Taking advantage of the reprehensible, permissive climate that rapidly creeps into every aspect of our lives, these purveyors of propaganda trample every tenet of journalistic integrity with total impunity. What we sometimes expect to be the unvarnished truth, as Cole points out, becomes a product of dishonest, manipulative editing. Free speech, one of the cornerstones of our democracy, deserves better.
The one honest admission used in the past - "the preceding was a paid political advertisement" - has been replaced by the more palatable "I approve of this message," both of which, I presume, are tolerable in an election contest. Within the larger context of TV political journalism, however, would it be too much to require the offending "spinmeisters" to warn the viewing audience that "the following is rated "P' for propaganda"?
-- Jerry Rawicki, Seminole
[Last modified July 24, 2004, 23:56:20]
