A Proposal for Health Care Reform

Work is busy and unending for pharmaceutical companies. In order to move pharmaceuticals out to the market its necessary to do the following things:

1. Make financial major contributions to medical schools to influence curriculum in a way that puts drugs as the first remedy for medial problems and de-emphasize prevention and health maintenance down the list.
2. Create direct to customer advertising promoting pharmaceuticals as if they are consumer products. Graphically show the benefits of the medicine, while not showing the side effects but stating them as quickly as possible at the end of the commercial.
3. Paying an army of physically attractive and medically un-knowledgeable pharmaceutical reps out to convince medically knowledgeable but physically unattractive physicians to use one particular copycat drug (presently, 70% to 86% of pharmaceutical research goes to copying drugs that have already been created – http://www.cepr.net/content/view/1095/45/) over another.

Blond women are a big part of communicating pharmaceutical research. Physicians like large buxom pharmaceutical reps as it helps them better focus on the clinical research. Free pens help physicians take notes, and free holidays help them relax and read the reports brought to them by super-hot pharm reps.

A Key Reform

As you can imagine all this work (the marketing, not the pharmaceutical research, which is roughly 40% of what is spent on marketing http://www.motherjones.com/news/qa/2004/09/09_401.html) is very expensive and the business model is in question with respect to an aging population and spiraling health care costs. The system can be greatly improved by removing bottlenecks. Unfortunately,the physician is now that bottleneck. His role as an intermediary between the drug customers (i.e. patients) and  pharmaceutical companies is no longer tenable. Costs could be greatly reduced if the physicians and medical schools were removed from the process and if drugs were treated like other consumer products.

In the new medical age, the physician is an anachronism which simply repeats pharmaceutical company recommendations to patients.

Vending machines with medical diagnostic software built in can do the same thing most GPs are doing.

Television advertising could be increased and drug vending machines could be set up and Walgreen’s and CSV. Patients (drug customers) would simply enter their symptoms and the machine would distribute the right drug based upon which major pharmaceutical company ( Merck, Eli Lilly, etc..) had bid on the customer’s business for that day.

This FDA can move from approving copycat drugs to making sure that the bidding process is transparent, and every pharmaceutical company is treated fairly and the profit maximizing price for drug customers (patients) is maintained.

Why Critics of This Approach are Wrong

Some critics have criticized this approach as corrupt. However, independence and fair play is ensured by the fact that the drug vending machines are owned by a separate company than the drug companies. An electronic bidding system will ensure that the pharmaceutical company that bids the most for the business gets the business. The FDA can dispense with its role of automatically approving falsified drug research and can move to regulating the bidding process that would be created under this system.

Great ad for restless legs syndrome, but be careful, taking drugs for restless legs syndrome may cause excessive gambling losses.

Links

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharmaceutical_company#Marketing
http://www.motherjones.com/news/qa/2004/09/09_401.html
86% of copycat drugs figure from Marcia Angell MD, Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School

http://www.cepr.net/content/view/1095/45/

DVD on Pharmaceuticals http://www.mediaed.org/videos/MediaAndHealth/BigBucksBigPharma