Big Pharma fights oversight

This is irritating.

The drug and medical-device industries are mobilizing to gut a provision in the stimulus bill that would spend $1.1 billion on research comparing medical treatments, portraying it as the first step to government rationing.

Read that to mean Big Pharma doesn't want you to find out the latest name brand pill they're advertising on the TV, is ten, or a hundred times more expensive than the pill it replaced when the patent ran out. It's an old industry trick. Change the formulation just enough to get a new patent so you can justify the cost under R&D. Profits before effectiveness always. A neutral study could end that game.

It's a good expenditure. As one industry puts it, "Comparative research has the potential to tell us which drugs and treatments are safe, and which ones work. This is not information that the private sector will generate on its own, or that the industry wants to share." Big Pharma would prefer you not trouble your beautiful minds with such mundane details and have already assembled a strike force of lobbyists to fight it. It's in all our best interests if they lose.

[More posts daily at The Detroit News.]