All posts tagged "Big Pharma"

At a cabinet meeting Tuesday, President Donald Trump floated the idea of imposing a 200% tariff rate on pharmaceuticals, which could cause the cost of medications to skyrocket.

"We'll be announcing something very soon on pharmaceuticals," Trump said. "We're gonna give people about a year, a year-and-a-half to come in, and after that, they're gonna be tariffed if they have to bring the pharmaceuticals into the country — the drugs and other things into the country — they're going to be tariffed at a very high rate, like 200 percent. We'll give them a certain period of time to get their act together."

Forbes reported that the enormous tariff rate, "could affect some $200 billion in imports and raise prices on Americans’ medications if it takes effect."...

In an erratic soliloquy before he signed an executive order to bring down the price of prescription drugs, President Donald Trump took aim at the "fat shot drug" he said was an example of how Big Pharma inflates the cost of medications.

Trump was presumably talking about the popular GLP-1 drugs on the market under a variety of brand names.

"I'll tell you a story," Trump began, as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Dr. Mehmet Oz looked on. ...

President Donald Trump never stopped raising money after he won the 2024 election, bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars check by check during top-drawer Mar-a-Lago dinners with health care industry executives, according to new reporting in The Wall Street Journal.

Reporters Josh Dawsey and Anna Wilde Mathews wrote that Trump held more than 50 dinner meetings at his Florida club where he wined and dined with heads of pharmaceutical companies, health insurance agencies, and hospital leaders who all wrote the largest checks.

They included the head of drug-maker Pfizer, pharmacy-benefit managers including CVS Health and UnitedHealth Group, and big insurers like CignaGroup, which all had a Mar-a-Lago dinner after their companies each ponied up at least $1 million....

Opiate addiction continues to tear through the U.S., but fortunately the Gloucester Police Department in Massachusetts has come up with an unconventional way to combat the epidemic. Instead of criminalizing addicts, they're focusing on battling the root of the problem while also offering rehabilitation to those who seek help.

[rebelmouse-image 24749726 original_size="400x300" expand=1]Kevin Drum pulls the "ignore dumb arguments and they'll go away" card. Anyone who was well-bullied in a pre-voting age educational environment knows that this strategy is to human psychology as the four humors are to medical science---sounds good on paper, but fails to prove itself in real world experiments basically ever. Matt Yglesias responds, pointing out that bad arguments are a cancer that has to be treated vigorously instead of simply ignored.

It's painful for me to write this, because I don't like criticizing people I generally admire, but if I'm going to get on the right for sex-phobia and anti-science thinking, I have to do it for the left, too. I hinted at my frustrations in my article about the reproductive health panel at WAM, but truth told, I was banging my head against my desk in frustration when a handful of anti-vaccination types absolutely destroyed any science-based, productive conversation by making the entire discussion about how Merck only invented Gardasil because they enjoy profiting off killing people. It's one of the most frustrating illogical habits of the left, to assume that because someone makes money at something, that action is almost surely immoral and probably actively evil. You definitely get that every time someone tries to make a scandal out of the fact that liberal and feminist bloggers have advertisements, and you get it in the anti-vaccination hysteria.