News flash: Drug executives are greedy assholes

The New York Times recently ran a story on how drug companies are facing a public image problem because Americans are getting fed up with paying for their extraordinary, indeed utterly unprecedented historically and unmatched internationall, levels of subsidy and assistance from the federal government.

Apparently these schmucks thought the Medicare bill was going to solve the problem. Now, even the Bush administration concedes that as a result of the bill, private insurance and pension plans are reducing their coverage of prescription drugs. To a considerable extent the plan amounts, then, to a handout to drug companies and employers, not seniors.

Take this passage from the Times story:

The pharmaceutical industry earns nearly two-thirds of its profits in the United States since drug prices in the rest of the industrialized world are largely government controlled. Those profits rely almost entirely on laws that protect the industry from cheap imports, delay home-grown knockoffs, give away government medical discoveries, allow steep tax breaks for research expenditures and forbid government officials from demanding discounts while requiring them to buy certain drugs.

Apparently the public and even members of Congress are beginning to realize this is insane. Let's remember, these are the folks who are fighting tooth and nail against the global expansion of access to generic HIV/AIDS drugs, which would save lives and slow the epidemic but hurt their (entirely outrageous) profit margins. People are beginning to realize what an obscene parody of free-market capitalism we are living through. The question, as with Bush administration policy generally, is this: how terrible will the human cost have to get before people will demand real change?