Day: May 31, 2023

Big Pharma Has Corrupted Universities, Journals — John Abramson, who was a family physician for 22 years before joining the faculty at the Harvard Medical School, righteously ripped America’s health care system in the February edition of Imprimis.

Abramson says that in 1980 our health care was on par with the rest of the West but began losing ground so that by 2019 there were 500,000 Americans dying each year in excess of the death rates of the citizens of the other technically advance nations.

He said it was not just with regard to our poor.

“To exclude poverty as a factor in these numbers, a study looked at the health of privileged Americans—specifically, white citizens living in counties that are in the top one percent and the top five percent in terms of income,” he said. “This high-income population had better health outcomes than other U.S. citizens, but it still had worse outcomes than average citizens of the other developed countries in such areas as infant and maternal mortality, colon cancer, childhood acute lymphocytic leukemia, and acute myocardial infarction.”

He said this is despite Americans paying on average $12,914 per person per year on health care, whereas those in comparable countries pay $6,125. 

He said this translate to an excess $2.3 trillion compared to those nations.

What caused the decline?

In 1980, the Bayh-Dole Act was passed allowing universities and nonprofit research institutions to commercialize discoveries made by their scientists while conducting federally-funded research. This included keeping profits from patents on pharmaceuticals. 

Before the Act, the overwhelming majority of pharmaceutical research was happening in universities without a profit motive. By 2005, almost three quarters of it was being done by under the auspices of mega corporations.

He said medical journals do not require  require that the drug companies submit their extensive internal clinical study and basically print what they are told to print else their funding would be cut.

He further noted that America is = spending 96 percent of our biomedical research money on medical drugs and devices, and only 4 percent on how to make the population healthier and how to deliver health care more efficiently and effectively.

“Why? he says. “Because the drug companies’ job is to maximize the money they return to their investors, and the highest return on research investment is not going to be from studying and promoting healthy diets and lifestyles. The money is in selling drugs and devices. This leads to a tremendous epidemiological imbalance in the information coming down to doctors.”

The entire article can be read here: https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/americas-broken-health-care-diagnosis-and-prescription/

Big Pharma Has Corrupted Universities, Journals