Pharma Company Breaks Promise To Lower Price Of Expensive, Lifesaving Drug

[senseamp]

The government is the one that's supposed to keep the greed in check. If you grant a monopoly on a necessity without any strings, you will get this kind of abuse.

 

[Genx87]

Oh so the drug market isn't free enough. That is why ancient drugs need to be jacked up 500x their previous value. LOL

Ask yourself why this drug is able to be jacked up? The answer arrives at govt regulation. Cant import drugs into this country. To produce this drug one has to be approved by govt regulators. The idea free market capitalism is the fault of this situation is horribly wrong. Free market capitalism would snuff this out pretty quick.

The pharma market is a real live example of the economic destruction protectionism is capable of delivering.

 

[1prophet]

The government is the one that's supposed to keep the greed in check. If you grant a monopoly on a necessity without any strings, you will get this kind of abuse.

Whether your exploiting the illegal for your cheap vegetables, laying off Americans for cheaper overseas labor, or the sick with high drug prices, it all comes down to the same thing, selfishness and greed being promoted as a virtue,

being taught to our current and future CEO's by our supposed liberal institutions bought and paid for by the corporations, and they honestly believe it is a good thing.

https://junctrebellion.wordpress.co...can-university-was-killed-in-five-easy-steps/

Step Four: You move in corporate culture and corporate money




To further control and dominate how the university is ‘used” -a flood of corporate money results in changing the value and mission of the university from a place where an educated citizenry is seen as a social good, where intellect and reasoning is developed and heightened for the value of the individual and for society, to a place of vocational training, focused on profit.


Corporate culture hijacked the narrative – university was no longer attended for the development of your mind. It was where you went so you could get a “good job”. Anything not immediately and directly related to job preparation or hiring was denigrated and seen as worthless — philosophy, literature, art, history.


Anna Victoria writes, on Corporate Culture: “Many universities have relied on private sector methods of revenue generation such as the formation of private corporations, patents, increased marketing strategies, corporate partnerships, campus rentals, and for-profit e-learning enterprises. To cut costs, public universities have employed non-state employee service contractors and have streamlined their financial operations.”


So what is the problem with corporate money, you might ask? A lot. When corporate money floods the universities, corporate values replace academic values. As we said before, humanities get defunded and the business school gets tons of money. Serious issues of ethics begin to develop when corporate money begins to make donations and form partnerships with science departments – where that money buys influence regarding not only the kinds of research being done but the outcomes of that research.


Corporations donate to departments, and get the use of university researchers in the bargain — AND the ability to deduct the money as donation while using the labor, controlling and owning the research. Suddenly, the university laboratory is not a place of objective research anymore. As one example, corporations who don’t like “climate change” warnings will donate money and control research at universities, which then publish refutations of global warning proofs. OR, universities labs will be corporate-controlled in cases of FDA-approval research. This is especially dangerous when pharmaceutical companies take control of university labs to test efficacy or safety and then push approval through the governmental agencies.


Another example is in economics departments — and movies like “The Inside Job” have done a great job of showing how Wall Street has bought off high-profile economists from Harvard, or Yale, or Stanford, or MIT, to talk about the state of the stock market and the country’s financial stability. Papers were being presented and published that were blatantly false, by well-respected economists who were on the payroll of Goldman Sachs or Merrill Lynch.


Academia should not be the whore of corporatism, but that’s what it has become. Academia once celebrated itself as an independent institution. Academia is a culture, one that offers a long-standing worldview which values on-going, rigorous intellectual, emotional, psychological, creative development of the individual citizen. It respects and values the contributions of the scholar, the intellectual, to society. It treasures the promise of each student, and strives to offer the fullest possible support to the development of that promise. It does this not only for the good of the scholar and the student, but for the social good.


Like medicine, academia existed for the social good. Neither should be a purely for-profit endeavor. And yet, in both the case of the HMO and the EMO, we have been taken over by an alien for-profit culture, our sovereignty over our own profession, our own institutions, stripped from us.


A corporate model, where profit depends on 1) maintaining a low-wage work force and 2) charging continually higher pricers for their “services” is what now controls our colleges . Faculty is being squeezed from one end and our students are being squeezed from the other.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

^ lol, college as a place to study the arts was for the few and wealthy in the past. It being treated as a place of vocational learning is due to the realities of modern work. China and Mexico can out-compete us easily when it comes to menial labor and manufacturing, so we've adopted an economy that sells services, research, invention, etc. Where would you have people learn engineering or an applied science if not a university?

No, we should totally go back to the good old days where 6x fewer people had degrees! Long live the bourgeoisie!