Investigation: Patients' Drug Options Under Medicaid Heavily Influenced By Drugmakers
July 18, 20185:00 AM ET
Heard on Morning Edition

"This is a business. And they would only be investing in this if it yielded returns."
Warner Chilcott, which is now owned by Allergan, was trying to beat one of the few mechanisms set up by state Medicaid agencies to hold down drug costs for taxpayers and ensure safety for patients.
How we investigated drugmakers' influence over Medicaid
The Center for Public Integrity began investigating the influence of the pharmaceutical industry on state Medicaid programs eight months ago. Prescription medications under those programs cost states tens of billions of dollars annually. The cost nearly doubled between 2008 and 2016
For more details on the methodology, see the description at CPI's website.
Medicaid, which uses state and federal tax dollars to pay for health care for 76 million poor or disabled Americans, tries to ensure that patients get drugs that work the best and yet are also affordable. States put those drugs on what they call "preferred drug lists."
While Medicaid must pay for nearly all drugs by law, states can make it harder to get more expensive or less effective drugs by requiring doctors to fill out cumbersome administrative paperwork to prescribe those not on the preferred lists.
Warner Chilcott's practices were particularly brazen and even illegal because the employees submitted false information to states. It pleaded guilty to felony health care fraud and agreed in 2015 to pay $125 million in civil and criminal fines. Allergan declined to comment.
A Center for Public Integrity and NPR investigation found drug companies have infiltrated nearly every part of the process that determines how their drugs will be covered by taxpayers: giving free dinners, consulting gigs and paying for state Medicaid officials to attend all-inclusive conferences where they can mingle with drug representatives.
Drugmakers use other tactics to get their products paid for by the Medicaid programs: lobbying state lawmakers to achieve their goals or helping doctors fill out extra paperwork to get Medicaid to pay for the costlier drugs as Warner Chilcott did. The result is that Medicaid sometimes spends more than necessary and may pay for medicines inappropriate for patients.
An example:
Enriching the decision-makers
Dr. Mohamed Ramadan volunteers on the 16-member Arizona committee that decides the state's list of preferred drugs.
He also earned more than $700,000 since 2013 from drug companies, federal data show, a healthy supplement to his $259,000 salary as a psychiatrist at a mental health clinic.
Some of the drugmakers' payments to Ramadan came in the form of lunches, dinners, travel, and consulting fees. But the bulk of it — more than $500,000 — was compensation for work such as speaking at events promoting certain drugs. Pharmaceutical companies paid Ramadan for these types of events 333 times over four and a half years — an average of more than once a week.

When we have profit over the welfare of its citizens, without regulations or laws to prevent the tilting of the scales towards more to the benefit of the industry, we have a very real problem. Do you agree?

Feel free to read more at: http://www.publicintegrity.org/2018/07/18/21953/how-we-investigated-drugmakers-influence-over-medicaid

I'm unfamiliar with Mutualism, so have no opinion on that; I'll have to look that up.

However, IMHO, we should get the government out of the democratic socialist business of medical and health management, and get back to being a Constitutionally limited Republic. Democracy is a very dangerous, unconstitutional, failure prone ideology (idiotology).

My case in point: The nurses made a bit of money on salary, while the hospital administrators, doctors, big pharma, big hospital, big insurance, and the Deep State operatives, made a helluvalot of money, complements of the so-called "greatest medical care system in the world" that the working taxpayers are required to support; all the while they were killing my wife with their government mandated cancer treatment methods. It took them about four and a half months to finally take her down, but it all began about five or six years before she was killed when a routine (recommended) mammogram found a small lump in her breast, which turned out to be a "stage zero cancer" (a tumor that "might" someday become a cancer, but maybe not at all) and they put her through their "recommended" surgery, chemo, and radiation (the cut/poison/burn routine) that in my opinion was unnecessary, and the weeks of hard radiation through her breast bones gave her leukemia (bone cancer), and that killed her, so they say. Actually, the medical system killed her about 11 years ago. A hospital therapy team also dropped her during a gurney to bed transfer and severely damaged her back, so she had to live the rest of her life, four months, in pain every time she had to be moved. Had we just waited and watched, my wife would most likely still be alive!

So I'm for just eliminating all the fancy hospitals with their astronomically expensive technology, big pharma and their poison pills that after a hundred years of research still won't even cure a common cold let alone a cancer because it isn't profitable for them to do so, and the government puppets in the FDA along with the best judges that money can buy that big pharma has purchased to defend their nefarious activities, and having insurance for every damned little thing, and big socialist Deep State government with its overreaching policies, and at least 95 percent of the lawyers, and all the political bullshit involving political correctness, euphemisms, and anti-USA and President Trump obstructionism, and just going back to being responsible for myself in all ways. We have so many laws, complements of democracy and democrats, that we can't go through a day without breaking one somewhere, so we have become a country of outlaws. Now, if we could just get rid of all this crap, it would solve a lot of problems, including me having to pay taxes to provide free needles to junkies, abortions to careless females, and free condoms to frisky lovers!

Who told you Socialism gave any rights to the citizens? The whole idea of Socialism is to take rights away from citizens and give the power to government to decide for the citizen.

There is a finite amount of power in any government. The more government has, the less the people have. It's that simple.

Anytime government takes your money and makes decisions on how to spend it in your behalf, you lose power. And every time you lose power, government agents have that much more power to sell to the highest bidder. It's not complicated.