Evelyn Pringle: 'Big pharma bankrupting US health care system'

Evelyn Pringle

Big Pharma is bankrupting the nation's health care system by convincing
prescribing doctors to over-medicate patients with expensive psychiatric
drugs and then send the bills to government programs like Medicaid and
Medicare.

The peddling of the new generation of psychiatric drugs that include the
selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors antidepressants (SSRIs), and
atypical antipsychotics that began arriving on the market in the late 1980s,
has become a cottage industry in the US.

Between 1986 and 2004, the sale of antidepressants went from $240 million to
$11.2 billion and the sale of antipsychotic drugs rose from $263 million in
1986 to $8.6 billion in 2004.

These two classes of drugs combined went from $500 million to nearly $20
billion in 2004, which translates to a 40-fold increase, according to award
winning journalist, Robert Whitaker, author of Mad In America.

"Gandalf Grey" infectedmail.com> wrote in message
news:44fd73f7$0$24206$9a6e19ea@news.newshosting.com...

Big pharma are pikers compared to the expense of having private health
insurance. Recent studies in the NEJM show that this country pays $300
Billion EXTRA in administration costs each year compared to a single-payer
health insurance scheme as implemented in every other industrialized
country. This extra administration cost is just for paper shuffling and
contributes NOTHING to health care.