Mark Karlin, Editor of BuzzFlash at Truthout

For many Americans, Big Pharma profiteering is a matter of life and death. (Photo: Thomas Hawk )

In spite of the recent scandals regarding predatory drug pricing for many vital medications, pharmaceutical companies and their CEOs are still engaging in wanton profiteering, as I noted a couple of months ago. If people have the money, they are going to pay whatever medication costs are necessary to save their lives, unless they are fortunate enough to have rare coverage for costly prescriptions. For individuals in medical need, it may be a matter of life or death, but for the drug industry it's just a matter of price-gouging to increase shareholder profits and the excessive compensation of CEOs.

That's the conclusion reaffirmed in a report, "Outrageous Fortunes: Big Pharma Executives Cash-In on High Drug Prices," conducted by the Institute for Health & Socio-Economic Policy (IHSP), a research arm of National Nurses United. An October 10 news release from Nurses United summarized key findings:

Top pharmaceutical executives are making billions of dollars in compensation while implementing skyrocketing price increases for essential medications, according a new research report released today by the California Nurses Association/National Nurses United.

In “Outrageous Fortunes,” the report finds that pharma executives were handed over $11 billion in compensation the past five years. In 2015, the most recent year for which the data is available, the ten highest paid pharma chief executive officers (CEOs) made $327 million....

The report finds a direct connection between executive pay, profiteering – through pay for performance arrangements based on profits and stock prices – and escalating drug prices that increasingly block patient access to affordable medication.

The report itself bluntly states the dire reality for the majority of the United States population:

Since the United States does not regulate prescription drug prices, Americans are forced to pay the price that the pharmaceutical industry chooses to charge. This often causes a financial strain for many American families. The median pay for healthcare and pharmaceutical executives in 2015 was approximately $14.5 million. Therefore, higher stock prices often mean more money for executives. Such an arrangement encourages executives to make risky and short term decisions that personally benefit them at the expense of consumers. The result is high medication prices that are often out of the financial reach of many American families; meanwhile, the median income for an American household was $56,500. The average American has experienced years of wage stagnation, while executives in the pharmaceutical industry have been continuously paid outrageously for their services.

Moreover, it may very well get far worse. On September 22, I interviewed Zahara Heckscher, 51, who was diagnosed with breast cancer eight years ago. She is experiencing its return in an advanced stage after remission. She was arrested the day before I interviewed her for protesting the Trans-Pacific Partnership by blocking the entrance to a congressman's office. Heckscher, who has great difficulty obtaining lifesaving and life-prolonging anti-cancer drugs in the US, believes that the TPP will increase the predatory power of Big Pharma exponentially. As she told me after she was released:

The corporate promoters of the TPP and the White House want to entice us by describing it as having beautiful wrapping paper with nice friendly unicorns and a gold ribbon. But you can't be enticed by the attractive wrapping paper because when you open the box, it is really ugly inside, as far as Big Pharma. They get patent guarantees, monopolies, weak enforcement on predatory pricing, and more.

If the TPP is passed by Congress in the lame-duck session, it will compound the threat to people's health: It will raise the prices of drugs in many nations that now are more stringent in limiting Big Pharma pricing -- and also more lenient in allowing generic drugs. This will impact people in the US who get vital drugs from Canada and Mexico, where prescription costs are generally much lower than in the US. You can be sure that the TPP won't benefit people in need of affordable medicine and infusion treatments, because the sections of the TPP relating to pharmaceuticals were primarily written by the industry itself.

Public Citizen -- a consumer advocacy group -- has a web page devoted to the impact of the TPP both domestically and abroad. It notes that the TPP's impact would be financially devastating to many people in need of costly drugs:

The Trans-Pacific Partnership would provide large pharmaceutical firms new rights and powers to increase medicine prices and limit consumers' access to cheaper generic drugs. This would include extensions of monopoly drug patents that would allow drug companies to raise prices for more medicines and even allow monopoly rights over surgical procedures. For people in developing countries involved in the TPP, these rules could be deadly – denying consumers access to HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and cancer drugs.The TPP would also establish new rules that could undermine government efforts to contain rising medicine prices in developed countries like the United States. An analysis of the final TPP text shows taxpayer-funded public health programs would be exposed to pharmaceutical company attacks and constrain future policy reforms to reduce prescription drug costs for Americans. The text explicitly binds Medicare to TPP rules that would limit proposed policy changes to tamp down healthcare costs for seniors.

TPP would further empower foreign pharmaceutical corporations to directly attack our domestic patent and drug-pricing laws in foreign tribunals. Already under NAFTA, which does not contain new corporate privileges proposed for the TPP, drug firm Eli Lilly has launched such a case against Canada, demanding $500 million for the government's enforcement of its own patent standards.

What's clear is that a global grid of pharmaceutical industry control of medication pricing is an expanding threat. We are witnessing an ongoing battle in which our health is losing out and Big Pharma's profits are expanding. That is compounded by the global threat of a legalized drug industry stranglehold on patents and prices.

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