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The idea of a patent makes good commercial sense. You give an inventor a monopoly to sell the new product without anyone being allowed to copy it. So, as a consumer, you either pay the asking price or go without. With no competition, the inventor can keep the price high and earn back the R&D costs fast. Once into profit, there’s a bigger return on the money invested and, in turn, this encourages more investment in R&D. The more consistently creative and innovative the manufacturer, the more money it makes. Except, this is a way of gouging the consumer. Let’s say for argument’s sake that the manufacturer gets a ten year monopoly and, at the end of five years, it has recovered all its R&D costs. It now has five years in which it can continue to charge the same high prices without there being any competition in the market. So here’s the question? How much profit should an inventor be allowed to make?

At present, this is never discussed let alone defined in law. Manufacturers simply demand increasingly long period of protection without regard to the payback time. Let’s say the development of a particular drug was a lucky accident. The company was testing for one use but noticed the participants were discussing an interesting side effect. That’s how the erectile dysfunction drugs were discovered. No one was trying to develop this drug so the actual R&D costs after the accidental discovery were to cover a comprehensive clinical trial and the application to the FDA – a fraction of the usual costs. Yet a court has just given one of the manufacturers protection from a generic manufacturer until 2019. That’s twenty-three years of protection in total. No one can possibly suggest this is anything other than a decision to keep on gouging the consumers. To make a sexist point – this is a decision of Rebecca Beach Smith, a female judge who obviously doesn’t care that men are paying excessive prices to keep their sexual satisfaction levels high.

So was this an unusual case? Actually, this was a standard case of a manufacturer taking out a second patent on the same product some years after the first. Nothing like stretching out your gravy train. Except there was one interesting twist. The generic manufacturer waited until it arrived in court and then accused the attorneys representing the patent holder of “inequitable conduct”. To translate this into English, it accused the poor lawyers of being dishonest, deceitful and fraudulent. Strong accusations except it was too late to raise them. To investigate would require the patent case to be adjourned, possibly for months. The judge ruled this should have been raised long before the case came to trial. Read the rest of this entry »

You have probably noticed Washing almost produced a default on “foreign” debt. The Republican party held the government hostage to force action on the deficit. Now don’t be misled here. There are real problems in owing too much money and, truth be told, we do owe too much as a nation. But there are a number of real problems if the only strategy government is allowed to discuss is where to make cuts because there comes a point when you stop cutting the waste and the redundant programs, and start cutting the socially useful programs. At some point, we need more revenue. That said, there’s a big issue to talk about here: the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare. In theory, this is a good idea. If you force everyone to pay for their care, the premiums for everyone will fall and we all benefit. But forcing everyone to pay may not be constitutional and it does nothing to control costs.

The government is the biggest buyer of drugs through Medicare and Medicaid. It has the power to negotiate with the pharmaceutical industry on the price for each drug. If it used this power, it could save the country billions of dollars and, as individuals within health plans, we would all see our premiums drop. All it takes is for the government to show a little concern for taxpayers. Except that would mean cutting the profits of the drug manufacturers and the President backed away from that during the first stages of trying to get the bill into law. He thought it was more important to get the votes for the law and worry about the costs later. Put another way he realized too many Democrats take lobby money from Big Pharma and would not vote for his law.

In other countries, governments direct the medical profession on what they are allowed to prescribe. So where there’s a choice, doctors are only allowed to prescribe generic drugs and not the brands. Even where branded drugs are still under patent protection, doctors in the public sector may not be allowed to prescribe the drugs if the regulators consider the prices too high. This leaves patients with the option of paying for the drugs out of their own pocket or, if they have private insurance, negotiating with the insurer to pay. Yes, this cuts into the profits of the drug companies, but which is more important? That a country should have an affordable healthcare service? Or that the profits of a few drug companies should be allowed to grow without limit? Read the rest of this entry »

The latest report from the Census Bureau has produced some worrying figures. It seems almost 17% of us are living below the federal poverty line. You have to go back to 1993 to find a higher percentage of Americans living in poverty. To add to the interest, the Super Committee in Washington has just begun its discussions on what to do about the federal deficit. Its choices are between increasing revenue to maintain more of our services or simply cutting spending. Given the terrible state of our economy, it’s hard to see what the federal government can do to help the poor. In this, there’s a secondary consequence looming into view. No matter what happens to Obamacare in its journey to implementation in 2014, there are an increasing number unable to afford health insurance. It’s currently estimated some 52.5 million adults are without any form of support from Medicare, Medicaid or VA benefits. This reflects the dramatic and sustained increases in the costs of treatment and care. We now have the highest retail prices for drugs, medical devices and hospital treatment in the world.

The European approach to pain management is evidence-based. In other words, the regulators have invested time and money to research which treatments are the best value-for-money. These treatments are then made available either free or at subsidized rates. All other treatments are left available but the patient must pay the full price, whether through private insurance or out of savings. The evidence consistently shows counseling in general and cognitive behavioral therapy in particular, are the best long-term strategies for pain management. In labor terms, this one-to-one approach is relatively more expensive than drug therapy in the short-term. But, if you look at the continuing costs of drugs and the added costs of dealing with problems of dependence and addiction, paying more at the initial stages of treatment gives a better outcome.

Unfortunately, this is not going to be rolled out in the US. First, it’s against the interests of the drug manufacturers. At the current high retail prices, their losses would be spectacular if doctors and therapists referred their patients to cognitive behaviour therapists. So the lobbying to doctors is firmly in place to keep the flow of prescriptions running smoothly. Second, the doctors would lose a share of the revenue to therapists. As things stand, it’s easy money to see multiple clients an hour and write prescriptions. Unless there’s a culture change, doctors are unlikely to cooperate. The only hope for forcing change comes from the health insurance industry. As more people are unable to pay their premiums, the profitability of insurers is being squeezed as health costs rise. They may decide to prefer paying for preventative medicine and cognitive behaviour therapy as the pain management strategy. Such is the insurers’ buying power, they may force some change. Except we need thousands of therapists and they are not in training. Someone in federal health planning forgot to order more people trained. Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s admit it, nearly all men watch porn. There’s nothing strange about it because visual representation of sex is very arousing for the male eye, in contrast to the emotional aspect of it that most women tend to. The porn industry is a multi billion business with hundreds of studios all over the globe and tens of thousands of titles produced every year. Porn movie development is less complicated, costly and time consuming as mainstream film production. A typical pron movie is shot during one day with actors sometimes being required to have sex several time during the shoot. When you realize it and take a look at the intense action on the screen there’s only place for wonder how come male performers are able to pull it all off in front of the camera. Well, of course, there are certain secrets of the trade and it turns out that Viagra is one of them.

Male porn performers are usually paid times less than female performers because the entire industry is focused on actresses. Rarely does a male actor get an exclusive contract with a good salary. Usually the paycheck is quite average, especially for the effort you have to give. All in all, no matter how good and pleasant sex may be when it turns into a 9 to 5 job with several sex acts every day, it turns into a real challenge that not many men can actually accept. It’s no longer a matter of when you want to do it, it’s a matter of doing it right all the time. And no wonder that under such pressure many men often face problems with erections. You can’t be 100% hard all the time on snap when the director asks you to. The female actress isn’t always your type, there are dozens of people on the set watching you and you could get more sleep yesterday. So when the camera starts rolling there’s a high risk of erection fading away. Read the rest of this entry »