Posted by
Frigglesnitz on Friday, February 22, 2008 9:15:51 AM
My responses to Jimmy and Sgt Relic to my recent blog, "The FDA Can't Be Fixed. Period" were too lengthy; thus this additional blog.
The FDA was charged, after the Kefauver hearings (you remember, the guy who occasionally wore a raccoon hat?), with not only assuring that drugs were safe, but effective as well.
There it began. That caused your "hoops that the FDA creates in order to get a drug to market."
Tort reform, as far as I'm concerned, is a problem only if drugs are unsafe or ineffective. That is in the province of the drugmakers and the FDA, and the FDA is too shorthanded to carry the day. And lawyers come in pretty handy if there's a legitimate claim. As an aside, I worked for lawyers for umpteen years -- not the ambulance-chasing kind -- and I do not completely agree with Shakespeare about lawyers. But I digress.
I have no problem with drugmakers wanting to make money. They're not in the charity business. But neither am I. Profit, yes. Profiteering, no.
Sgt Relic, going offshore will not cause a cessation in the "legal nightmare"; that nightmare was inherent in the drugs and drugmakers -- and the FDA -- to start with. It is an inverse problem.
As far as an unfriendly tax structure is concerned, I believe you can think again. Look into manufacturing writeoffs (while manufacturing is done outside the U.S.); look into advertising, which everybody knows is paid for by the American consumer, as well as paying for its so-called humongous outlay in drug research. Also, everybody knows there have not been many real breakthrough drugs in years; rather, drug companies are simply adding something to a drug so that it's longer-acting, or some such other change, and calling it "new." Then umpteen years of patents can be tacked on as well. Nice work if you can get it.
Remember that much research is being done for these blood-suckers by the taxpayers through NIH and government-sponsored university facilities.
So I would hardly call the drugmakers' tax structure "unfriendly." I am "unfriendly" to the morass that is called the FDA, whose expenses are growing by leaps and bounds.
Who pays for those expenses? The American taxpayer. The American prescription drug user. And if the drugmaker is paying very much to the FDA, it had better watch its p's and q's. You know it will be on the Q.T.
And don't forget that the drug industry pays millions and millions for lobbyists. Why do you suppose that is? Who pays the freight on that, pray tell? The drugmaker? My good laugh for the day.
I just happen to believe that the FDA's "Partnership with China" is rather unsavory. And the thought of paying for it through our taxes makes me sick. It should not, I repeat, not, be the responsibility of the American taxpayer to assure that China or any other country works within safety guidelines.
As with the FDA, so goes the CPSC. The budgets for these bureaucracies are exploding because of the necessity to check every nook and cranny of every manufacturing plant in China to New Jersey and everywhere in between. Why? Is it because they don't need to be checked? Right.
My problem is with the necessity of American taxpayers apparently having to pay for all of it.