Ouch! Hey, Honey?!?
Ever heard of manuka honey from New Zealand? Probably not. If that’s the case, you can blame the drug companies.
Manuka honey, when prepared and used properly, is one of the most potent and effective wound care options known to man. I just heard a story of a woman who had broken her foot, and though the surgery to remove the bone fragments and set the bone was successful, the surface wound would not heal. The situation dragged on for months, and progressed to the point where the woman and her doctor were discussing amputation.
Amputation. Amputation!
Three days after the application of the manuka honey, the wound had healed more than it had in the past six months. The woman got to keep her foot. I’d call that a good outcome, wouldn’t you? Some kiwi bees got it all over SmithKlineBeacham, apparently.
But unless you’re heavy into holistic medicine, you have never heard of manuka honey, and if you ask your doctor about it you’ll probably get a dismissive shrug and short speech about snake oil and witch doctors. This is something that could potentially help to improve, and maybe even save lives all over the world. But it’s relegated to the little-traversed and much-maligned corners of the medical community.
The private, for-profit health care system is to blame.
Drug companies are out for the big payoff. Find a drug that works, patent it (pay attention, this is key), and then sell it in massive quantities for the huge payoff. So they spend the bulk of their time on research, trying to find the chemical recipe for a lottery ticket.
Why so much time in the lab? Because the recipe they come up with has to be man-made. You can’t patent something that occurs naturally (!!!) so what they come up with has to be something nobody has tried before. They can’t get the big payoff from tree sap or fish oil or ear wax — they can’t patent it, so if they do spend all the time and money on human trials, once it hits market they have to compete with every other manufacturer that wants to produce it. If they patent a drug, they can (and do) sell it for $1000 a pill if they want to. Drug patents last seventeen years. Drugs like Viagra sell a million pills a day. Do the math: and if you’re looking for a lock-solid investment for your retirement account, buy drug company stock.
But if the drug the company develops can’t be patented, the market sets the price. Research and development, animal trials, human trials, years of coaxing the government into approving it for sale, and then no payoff. Their product has to be priced at what the market will bear, up against all competitors who choose to sell the same product. And heaven forbid these free-market medicine advocates should have to actually *participate* in the free market. But I digress.
The manuka honey situation is a prime example. Drug companies can’t make a buck off of it, so they ignore it. Instead they come up with their own product, put the force of their marketing juggernaut behind it, and when a dozen other companies do the exact same thing, products like manuka honey get lost in the noise. It’s really a miracle we know about it at all, and quite frankly it raises the possibility that there are thousands of other products we *don’t* know about that are similarly effective.
The end result: we get lower-quality medications and treatments than we could potentially get; people’s quality of life goes down, or worse yet, they lose their lives entirely; and the drug companies continue to get richer.
What’s the solution? Remove the profit motive. Drug researchers aren’t in their field because of the money. People who choose careers based exclusively on income potential are all lawyers or investment bankers. Researchers love doing research, and they don’t care whether they ever get the bazillion-dollar payoff: the satisfaction for them is to find the drug or treatment that helps the most people. So taking the lottery winnings away from the research community won’t affect their zeal or their effectiveness one bit.
What we need to do is make sure they have the resources they need to investigate *everything* they think might do the best job. 110% funding, the freedom to pursue any direction they want to go, the best facilities and equipment money can buy, essentially a bottomless well of resources so that they can identify and develop the best possible medical treatments and procedures.
How do you do that? Consolidate all research under one umbrella and fund it with public money. The infrastructure already exists, mostly at colleges and universities all over the country. Shift the priorities of the research community away from patents and on to effective treatments, because that’s what we’re ultimately trying to produce anyhow!
This relieves the drug companies of 99% of their risk and cost. No more research, no more trials, no more FDA approval quagmires, all of that disappears. The government-funded research now handles all of that. Additionally, with research being coordinated by one central entity, there is no expensive duplication of effort. We’d need probably two independent teams researching anything that showed promise past a certain point, but not a dozen drug companies all chasing the same drug with the same characteristics and cutting corners in their efforts to get to market first. The best products, the safest products, the most cost-effective products will be the ones that end up on pharmacists’ shelves.
And what about cost? How do these products get to market? We will still hold the patents on the medications that are developed, but the government will take bids on production every year. The company that submits the lowest per-unit bid gets the contract, and for that period obtains the right to sell that product at that price directly to doctors, hospitals, and pharmacies. This also totally eliminates marketing costs: the government will assume the responsibility of notifying the medical community about new and existing drugs, meaning doctors will no longer be deluged with dozens of drug company reps badgering them during office hours to hawk their wares and drop off logo-laden ball point pens, calendars, and Post-It™ notes.
Who wins? We do, researchers do, and to a large extent the doctors/hospitals/pharmacies do too. In the attempt to “recoup research costs” — pronounce that “pad our bank accounts” — the brand-name medications we buy are marked up over 99%. In simple terms, each dollar we spend on drugs consists of 99 cents profit for the drug companies. Switching to a system of this nature will slice hundreds of billions of dollars off the amount we spend on health care every year.
Who loses? The money-grubbing hypercapitalist mercenaries: drug company executives, insurance companies, HMO’s. As illustrated above, most of what they add to the equation is pure profit for them and their shareholders, and it comes straight out of our pockets. And I’m sorry, I have a serious issue with fat cats getting richer when my kid gets an ear infection. It’s morally reprehensible: the only thing that separates it from extortion is the middle-man at the pharmacy counter.
Will the U.S. medical community survive? Alas, no, it will not survive: it will blossom and thrive as never before. Life expectancy will top industrialized nations (we are currently in the bottom half of that ranking), primary care will be more effective in reducing visits to specialists and emergency rooms, hospital stays and recovery periods will shorten, costs will plummet. Health care will see a resurgence the likes of which not seen since the Salk vaccine.
Will the money men survive? Oh yes, they will. Some of them will adapt to the new order, but most others will find a new way to rake in the big bucks and pack up shop. So much the better. Let them make widgets, or sell ice to Eskimos, or lease out land parcels on Mars. Whatever they do, it will be less of a harm to humanity than what they are doing now.
Anybody in this presidential campaign listening to this? Hmm?
