When I hear the politicians talk about death panels and rationing, we need to be talking about rational use of medicine. Not rationing but rational. And unfortunately that is not happening in the United States.
There is this drug called Prilosec. Suppresses acid in the stomach. Great drug. AstraZeneca only had one problem. Eighteen-year patent. Four years left on the patent.
Five billion dollar a year drug. Lots of money made off of Prilosec. ‘What’s going to be our next multibillion dollar drug?’ Well they started this thing called ‘operation shark fin,’ the search for the next multibillion dollar drug.
They couldn’t find a new drug but they found a very smart chemist who knew a little bit of patent law. You see Prilosec when it was made is a big molecule and – not to get too much into the chemistry – there is really two chemicals there and they’re mirror image isomers.
Well, you have the pill Prilosec – the left suppresses acid, the right [side of the pill] your liver takes out sends it to the kidney and you urinate it out. But it’s the left [side] that’s active.
Well the smart chemist realized it’s just one quick easy chemical step in the lab to do what your liver does for you. Separate left from right. And so they separated left from right, they did a series of studies that they sent to the FDA arguing that this new drug, which we have patented called Esomeprazole is equivalent to the old drug.
And the FDA agreed that the new drug was equivalent to the old drug so the FDA approved it. It’s equivalent in side effects, its equivalent in efficacy. And then they went to their marketing guys and they said how are we going to market this drug, the next multibillion dollar drug for AstraZeneca? And the marketing guy said ‘we’re going to package it as a big purple pill and then they said what are we going to call our next multibillion dollar drug? Let’s screw them, let’s call it Nexium.’
Okay, now I happen to go to Costco yesterday. A pill of Nexium is $6. A pill of Prilosec is $1 and a pill of generic Prilosec is 35 cents. Okay. Now one of the ten most prescribed drugs in the United States today is Nexium. At $6 a day. But, all the science tells us it was FDA approved because it was equivalent to something that costs 35 cents a day.
And we wonder why we have 18 percent of our GDP going towards health care.
By the way, about $8,000 per man, woman and child is what health care costs in the United States today. The number two country, which is Switzerland, is a little less than $4,000. Switzerland is fourth among UN countries in life expectancy and we’re 50th. I don’t think we get what we pay for.
SOURCE: Dr. Otis Brawley: ‘The System Really Is Not Failing … Failure Is The System’ – Kaiser Health News.