Cute Corporate Capitalist Cultistry

It's just so adorable the way capitalists and their lackeys manage to think of themselves as brave, risk-taking pioneers, standing alone against the barbarian hordes in the awesomely dangerous jungles of corporate throat-cutting and skinning-alive Big Business behavior when what they really spend their time doing is cutting risk to the minimum and shoving the expense of whatever's left onto someone else. Like taxpayers.

FDL's Jane Hamsher has been doing a little research, and that's always a bad sign for corporate capitalist lackeys like Jay Inslee, a Washington State Democrat who has taken it upon himself to co-sponsor a bill that would perpetualize Big Pharma drug profits for, like, forever and ever and ever on the theory that they, um, deserve that money because these courageous privateers profiteers corporate altruists took such giguntous financial risks so an artist could live longer. Or something. First the fantasy:

[Inslee] seems to believe that these companies need to be granted a monopoly on these drugs so that investors can recoup the money the[y] risk for developing them:

A fellow named Eric Limburgh, he’s Limburgh’s grandson of fame. He’s in Snoquamish Washington who was bedridden due to rheumatoid arthritis til these guys invested about a billion dollars to build a product called “Enbrel.”

He’s now up walking around, he’s a successful artist whose life has been restored because we have laws that allowed investors to put a billion dollar investment that eventually, through luck and incredible creativity, built this drug to save his life.

That’s the guy I’m thinking of when I’m voting on this, that does create the appropriate balance of protecting investors’ investment and moving forward, and I think that’s the right balance.

Dry your eyes, b's & g's. I know that their apparent great generosity chokes you all up but unfortunately the truth turns out to be just a tad different.

But an analysis  by Knowledge Ecology International shows that it is doubtful that Amgen spend more than $400 million on clinical development of the drug before approval, and that more than half of the early Phase I and II clinical trials on this drug were funded by the government through NIH or by universities. Amgen invested money, but invested most of its money late, when the risks were low. And, on top of this, some of the Amgen outlays on clinical trials qualified for the orphan drug tax credit, which means that U.S. taxpayers pick up half the costs of those trials.

Moreover, even if Amgen had spent $1 billion developing Enbrel, they’ve been more than amply awarded given that Enbrel is the top-selling biologic drug with reported sales of $5.29 billion in 2007 alone.  (PDF)

I'd say that a more than 500% profit should be sufficient, especially when it's actually more like 2000%. But Jay doesn't see it that way. Jay feels that if his owners sponsors close corporate friends are ready to pretend they took a lot of risks, we ought to pay them for their illusions because they, you know, believed they were taking great risks and that's practically the same as actually taking them, right? And shouldn't we all get 2000% rewards in perpetuity if we feel we've been brave?

Well, no, because we don't all pay into Jay Inslee's campaign chest and thus are not as deserving as those who do. We aren't as brave and generous and so the "right balance" isn't there.

I guess.

Comments

[vwclown]

Thanks for bringing Jay out into the open here. Scrape the "D" off and what do you have? (I'll just let your imagination run wild for a minute...) I appreciate you providing the basics on 'How Really Expensive Medicine Gets to Your Local Pharmacy'.

[mick]

Actually, in other areas Inslee doesn't seem to be such a hopeless conservaDem as this makes him appear. It's a matter of corporate puppetry through campaign donations, wherein to keep them coming one has to cater to the $$$ even if that means selling out your constituents.

It isn't the fact that Inslee's a CP that gets to me so much as the radical mythology he chooses to use to justify his corruption. It's one thing to make bogus arguments because your boss tells you to, that is something many of us have had to do to keep our jobs. It's something else altogether to claim that your boss is some kind of hero for stealing the pocket money of the poor. That's just gratuitous brown-nosing.