Big Pharma uses Consumer Protection Process to Drive up Your Drug Costs

And you should be angry...

...Petitions to FDA Sometimes Delay Generic Drugs: "A procedure designed to alert the Food and Drug Administration to scientific and safety issues is getting a hard look from members of Congress, who say they are concerned that it may be getting subverted by the brand-name drug industry.

Some at the FDA, as well as leaders in the generic drug industry, complain that 'citizen petitions' -- requests for agency action that any individual, group or company can file -- are being misused by brand-name drugmakers to stave off generic competition.

The simple act of filing a petition, they say, triggers another round of time-consuming and often redundant reviews of the generics by the FDA, which can take months or years. In the process, consumers continue to pay millions of dollars more for the brand-name drugs."

...but be careful of a Republican congress "looking" at your consumer protections. We know by now that Republicans never do anything for you without it being one side of a splitting strategy: target the consumer protection their big money lobbying friends want lifted and then find a way to logically argue that the consumer ill can't be removed without gutting the consumer protection as the solution.

There is no basis in fact for such presumptions. It is all a matter of framing. And the argument is *always* framed that the *only* course of action precludes any regulation of the industry behavior. That is a lie. That is false representation of the possibilities. Never accept the presumptions of how a process must be framed from this Congress. It will always cost you more in the future than any price you believe you are being led to pay now. Remove a process so that your generics can be had more speedily? NO! Slap the hand of pharma abusers--hard--and make them put the candy back!!