Merck - $1.2 Million lobbying in 2nd qtr - Merck wins, Seniors lose

Novartis, Pfizer - you name it. I used to be part of big Pharma, but grew disillusioned years ago - they have badly lost their way and are money black holes, unimaginative, resistant to change...and ultimately, doomed to become obsolete.

corcumvent US stupidity. I'm going to be 65 in Sept. and I have a stake in this issue, but it's stupid for our gov't to take advantage of Canadian drug prices because they had the balls to set limits on the drug companies and we didn't! I think it should be OK to buy drugs from there, but we sure shouldn't give up on putting those same restrictions on the damn drug companies here!

would probably be the lowering of prices here, because of competitive reasons. At least that would be a start.

:hi:

Not that they push medicines that are evil, but that they don't they don't make their medicines affordable to many who need them. It's a scandal all right.

so you oppose Merck lobbying to keep the prices of drugs high, but you
have no problem with them marketing dangerous drugs that kill people?

And you know the history of Vioxx, right?

but countless more people have died from not having access to medication, than from bad drugs. And in fact more people were given dangerous medication in the past, because it was all that was available (e.g. laxatives and emetics for everything; bleeding) than nowadays. Indeed mercury - the villain of so many posts here - was used as a medicine quite frequently in the past!

I support strict controls and testing on medications; and patients' right to choose not to take a medication if the side-effects *for them* are worse than the disease. But what concerns me is that the problems with certain medications are sometimes being used as a justification for attacks on 'Western' or 'conventional' medicine as a whole. It's as though the undoubted fact that many people have died from eating contaminated food were used as an argument against ever eating!