Health Care Archive

The Amazing Small Business Health Care Program You have never heard of…

Working Americans are supposed to get their health coverage through their employer.  Supposed to, however, doesn’t mean they do.  In fact, millions of Americans are working but don’t receive an employer-sponsored health plan.  Why not?   Small businesses (employing less than 50 people) are not required to provide health insurance and, especially in rural areas, many cannot afford the additional cost. 

Still, those small businesses do need their employees to be healthy!  And luckily for them, the government has their backs: it provides over 15 million working Americans with the medical coverage that they could not afford on their own and don’t get from their employer.

This amazing program should be called the Small Business Employees Health Program because of the essential benefits it supplies -- not just to those workers and their families but to small businesses themselves.  Indeed, guaranteeing the health care of those workers just might be the best support that government gives our small business community.

 Sounds like a great program, right?  One that all politicians enthusiastically should support.

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How Big Drug Companies Exploit the Patent System to Stifle Competition and Inflate Prices

March 26, 2023

In principle, pharmaceutical companies should make their money by developing new drugs that improve patient treatment and cure disease. This process, however, is time-consuming, expensive, and filled with uncertainty. All things that CEOs and investors hate. They want to guarantee big profits year after year and have figured out how to do just that by manipulating their patents.

The U.S. patent system is a wonderful creation. It is supposed to encourage innovation by providing a 20-year window for a company that owns the invention to commercialize it without copycat competition. But drug companies have found a way to exploit our patent system by extending the high prices and profit lifespans of their existing highly profitable drugs.

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Pfizer’s Covid Pill Gets Highest Recommendation. Here’s where to find it. Ivermectin? Not Even Mentioned.

May 18, 2022

Pfizer’s anti-Covid drug Paxlovid is the treatment of choice for patients at risk of covid complications, according to multiple recent studies. The pill was shown to reduce hospitalization by a remarkable 85% when started within 5 days of the onset of symptoms. Two other drugs, from Merck and Gilead, were given somewhat weaker but favorable recommendations.

And what about Ivermectin, the veterinary deworming drug widely touted by Trump supporters and still being prescribed by a few doctors in the area? It was not even mentioned. In fact, more than 30 clinical trials of over 10,000 COVID-19 patients have shown that Ivermectin not only failed to reduce mortality but could cause serious side effects. As a result, the FDA does not approve it to treat Covid.

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Insulin costs 10 times more in the U.S. than in any other industrialized country. Most Republicans in Congress vote against changing that.

April 19, 2022

Of the nearly 40 million people who have diabetes in America, 25% or 7.4 million need to take insulin regularly… for the rest of their lives… or they die… and the manufacturers know this.

Combine this vital urgency to access insulin, with its high price, with health insurance that is unaffordable to many, and the very high obesity rate in America that spawns particularly high rates of diabetes, and you have a recipe for disaster.

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Build Back Better bill to Allow Medicare to Negotiate Lower Drug Prices

November 18, 2021

At Last!
Everyone knows that buying a thousand of something should get you a better price than buying just one.  What about 63 million?  That’s how many Americans are on Medicare.  Yet when the current Medicare drug provisions were passed under George Bush, the big pharmaceutical companies managed to insert a provision that actually prohibited Medicare from negotiating lower drug prices for its seniors!  In other words, big Pharma was free to charge seniors whatever it felt like.  And it did.  In fact, it set prescription drug prices so high in America that, according to the non-partisan AARP, Americans pay far more than other countries for the exact same drugs!  Just one example:  the cost of the insulin drug Humalog (a life-saving drug for diabetics) was $300 in the US but only $32 in Canada!*

Not surprisingly, all this has been extremely unpopular with the American people.  In fact, large majorities of Americans in both parties have consistently said they want Congress to change the law. So why hasn’t Congress acted?  

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