“This was an unexpected victory in a long fight against an illegal cartel of three corporations who have raised their insulin prices in lockstep.”

The Biden Administration pleasantly stunned health care reform advocates Tuesday by including short-acting insulin in its list of 10 drugs for which Medicare will negotiate lower prices, power vested in the White House by the Inflation Reduction Act.

The IRA was passed in the face of one of the heftiest barrages of lobbying in congressional history, with the pharmaceutical industry spending more than $700 million over 2021 and 2022 — several times more than the second- and third-ranking industries — much of it aimed at stopping the legislation, watering it down, or undermining its implementation.

  • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    I am going to throw this out there. I worked on waste processing systems for pharm companies for about 4 years, no it wasn’t every day, it was like one out of three projects.

    Those pieces of garbage waste money harder and faster than any other industry or government I have ever dealt with. And that includes the US military, the gangster government of Saudi Arabia, and just plainly badly run factories. This is just one story

    I designed some software for a system that reduced one chemical that was hard to dispose of into two easy to dispose of ones. No big deal. Sent it out and wrapped up in few days. Come in one morning to see this email exchange, heavily paraphrased

    “Please inform (my name) that he is to fly into site for a Monday meeting to discuss the problems”

    “He designed the software this is a chemistry problem”

    “We want everyone on the project there”

    “Again he is the software guy this is a chemistry problem”

    “We want everyone on the project there”

    “Why can’t he just sit in a conference call? He has other projects”

    “We want everyone on the project there”

    They flew me out, put me in a hotel, got me a rental car, paid for 4 meals, all so I could sit in for that 30 minute meeting and contribute nothing. There was well over 20 people in that room. I chatted with a few. This is welder, this is the concrete guy, this was an electrician, this was the tech that ran an Ethernet cord, this was the boiler guy. All of us sitting there while the chemical engineer just repeat back what he said in the email that they have to clean the tanks again.

    Btw my employer charged 2 grand a day for me on site and 2 grand for travelling on top of expenses. I had sushi for dinner that night and stayed in a 3 star hotel, eating your grandma’s insulin money. You try to imagine what kinda money we are talking about. Over 20 highly skilled techs and engineers having to travel there. Go hire an electrician for a day and see what you get charged.

    I want to tell this story to every bootlicker pharm shill in this country. This kinda shit is where the money is going. Not into R&D it is going so one manager could say they did their due diligence.

      • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        Buy me a few beers some day. Tell you some more

        1. The time an upper manager suggested we consider an ancient serial protocol to solve a trivial comm problem and a quarter of a million was spent for something never used and now it is still out there wasting electricity.

        2. The time we used a HMI (like an iPad but for machines) that was 10x fold more expensive than what we needed because they wanted consistent parts but no else was using it and the part was no longer manufactured. The standard was not standard.

        3. The time I was ordered to prove a pump worked but the water lines hadn’t been run so we sat there listening to it grind itself into early death just to get a box checked.

        4. Full wash down capabilities on electronics for an area with only dry paper waste.

        5. And my personal favorite the time I had (again 2,000 dollars a day) to drive six hours to tell them that the broken level sensor that was clearly broken in the picture they sent me was clearly broken. I applied the full power of my many years of experience and engineering degree to determine that if a sensor looks like someone repeatedly hit it with a hammer it may not work.

        • uis@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          Dear Lauren! It sounds worse than Russia! It sounds worse than everything I knew!