Washington PostOctober 13, 2015
COOPER: And welcome back to the final round of the CNN Democratic presidential debate. This is a question to each of you. Each of you, by the way, are going to have closing statements to make. Each of you will have 90 seconds. But a final question to each of you. If you can, just try to – 15 seconds if you can. Governor Chafee, Franklin Delano Roosevelt once said, "I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made." You’ve all made a few people upset over your political careers. Which enemy are you most proud of?
COOPER: Secretary Clinton?
CLINTON: Well, in addition to the NRA, the health insurance companies, the drug companies, the Iranians. Probably the Republicans.COOPER: Senator Sanders?
SANDERS: As someone who has taken on probably every special interest that there is in Washington, I would lump Wall Street and the pharmaceutical industry at the top of my list of people who do not like me…
Boston Globe – STATBy David NatherOctober 15, 2015The man who has become the public face of rising drug prices says he has donated to presidential candidate Bernie Sanders — who has been bashing Big Pharma on the campaign trail — to try to get a meeting so the two can talk it out. Sanders isn’t interested. His campaign said Thursday that he’s giving the money to a Washington health clinic instead — and the drug executive isn’t getting the meeting.
Martin Shkreli, chief executive officer of Turing Pharmaceuticals, became one of the Democrats’ favorite villains after raising the price of the only treatment of a rare parasitic infection by 4,000 percent. He’s an unlikely supporter of the Vermont senator, a self-described socialist who has proposed letting people import cheaper prescription drugs from Canada and requiring Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices. In an interview with Stat on Thursday, however, Shkreli confirmed that he’d donated $2,700 to the Sanders campaign — the maximum individual contribution — on Sept. 28. At the time, the campaign sent the Turing CEO a form e-mail full of populist fervor: “Our political system is corrupt. Big Money controls much of what happens. Together, you and I are changing that. Thank you again for your support. Best, Bernie.”
On Thursday, however, campaign spokesman Michael Briggs said Sanders won’t keep the money. Instead, the campaign will make a $2,700 donation to the Whitman-Walker health clinic in Washington. “We are not keeping the money from this poster boy for drug company greed,” Briggs said.
Shkreli made the contribution, he said, partly because he supports some of Sanders’ proposals — just not the ones about drug prices. But mainly, he said, he donated to get the senator’s attention in the hopes that he could get a private meeting to explain why drug companies set prices the way they do.
Shkreli is “furious” that Sanders is using him as a punching bag without giving him a chance to give his side. “I think it’s cheap to use one person’s action as a platform without kind of talking to that person,” Shkreli said in the interview. “He’ll take my money, but he won’t engage with me for five minutes to understand this issue better”…
Boston GlobeBy David NatherOctober 16, 2015Hillary Clinton has said she is proud to have drug companies as her enemies – but she is also taking their money. Lots of it. The Clinton campaign received far more money from the drug and medical device industries than any other presidential candidate in either party during the first six months of the campaign, according to figures compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. She accepted $164,315 during that period.
The figures don’t include the third-quarter contributions, which were filed with the Federal Election Commission on Thursday. They represent mostly individual donors affiliated with the pharmaceutical industry, as well as some political action committee money. The donors also include two senior executives of a company that recently imposed a massive price increase on one of its drugs…
And when we compare ourselves using the metric of the rest of the world, we stand out from the crowd:
October 9, 2015With prescription drug prices skyrocketing, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said today he will vote against confirming Dr. Robert Califf as the new commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration because of his ties to the industry. “At a time when millions of Americans cannot afford to purchase the prescription drugs they need, we need a new leader at the FDA who is prepared to stand up to the pharmaceutical companies and work to substantially lower drug prices. Unfortunately, I have come to the conclusion that Dr. Califf is not that person,” Sanders said after speaking with the nominee. Califf’s confirmation will come before the Senate health committee, which Sanders sits on.
Americans pay, by far, the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs. Last year, one in five Americans were unable to afford the drugs their doctors prescribed. Prices for some prescription drugs soared 1,000 percent or more in recent years. Since 2002, total spending on medicine in the United States went up by more than 90 percent. Sanders cited Califf’s extensive ties to the pharmaceutical industry he would oversee.
The New York Times recently reported that Califf ran a multimillion-dollar clinical research center at Duke University that received more than 60 percent of its funding from the pharmaceutical and medical device industry. He has written scientific papers with pharmaceutical company researchers. His financial disclosure form last year listed seven drug companies and a device maker that paid him for consulting and six others –including Merck, Novartis and Eli Lilly – which supported his university salary.
“Instead of listening to the demands of the pharmaceutical industry and their 1,400 lobbyists, it is about time that the FDA and Congress started listening to the overwhelming majority of the American people who believe that medicine is too expensive,” the senator said. “It is time for the United States to join the rest of the industrialized world by implementing prescription drug policies that work for everybody, not just the CEOs of the pharmaceutical industry."
“The easiest part of psychotherapy with patients who have chronic maladaptive character traits is figuring out what they do repetitively that undermines their other important life goals. But as easy as it is to see that from the outside, seeing it from the inside is quite another matter. These traits are part of self-definition, identity, and any frontal assault just comes across as exactly that – an assault. It’s important to focus biographic exploration on the trait, because one usually finds that the patient came by it honestly in adapting to a previous difficult situation.”
Imagine having Hillary Clinton as a patient. I certainly would never want to work with this woman, irregardless of what the hourly rate would be. She has to be one of the most antisocial candidates ever running for President of the United States I have ever watched. She can’t even keep up with her lies and incongruencies in her deeds.
As I have written before and will continue to do so, it’s not her running for office that frightens me most, but that there is an entrenched 30% of the alleged electorate that will vote for her irregardless of whatever she has or will do prior to next November.
And what does that say about the percentage of patients who just pursue meds without any hesitation nor contemplation of the Risk/Benefit profile to some they demand, er, ask for?
And then why they don’t respond to those, what, 10 or more different med trials for that alleged mood or anxiety disorder. What are those magic pills for characterological disorders again?…
I don’t know if “self-evident” is enough anymore. You’d think so but people are simply out of it. It’s abundantly self evident that the financial services industry, which largely caused the 2008 meltdown, is the country’s most protected and corrupt too big to fail class and that was cemented with bipartisan support in the bailout. But few seem too upset about it and ending too big to fail isn’t even a campaign issue. It’s self-evident that TSA is security theatre that is huge a waste of time and affront to dignity but no one is talking in the campaign about ending it.
The 18th century pioneers didn’t have TV and Instagram and the Kardashians to distract them from the important business of the day so they paid attention to publications like Common Sense. Frankly, I think most Americans are sleepwalking and maybe overmedication has something to do with this in addition to brain dead media.
I think we keep on making the same mistakes over an over again, because that’s what we’ve been doing this century and past is prologue. Watch all the mystified tears when the next stock market/ real estate bubble breaks.
Twenty-six years with the power of a U.S. Senator and Bernie Sanders had not authored one piece of progressive legislation. In fact, there is not a single bill with his name on it. He talks a good game, but his record is dismal.
Bernie Sanders is just another rainbow farting unicorn who promises revolution with his mouth. His followers are dreamers who imagine the revolution coming after a collapse and have branded President Obama a RINO, for instance, for extending unemployment insurance in exchange for a concession to the GOP. These are people who will never face the threat of becoming homeless or not having health insurance— they are, primarily, trust fund kids who don’t care what happens to other people, they want ideological purity and self-flattery. Bernie Sanders is Randy Marsh.
OK. I get it. My bad. No more mentioning politics…