Big Pharma is The Biggest Tax Dodger in America
By louisehartmann
The pharmaceutical industry is the single biggest defrauder of Americans taxpayers in the country – surpassing the Defense Industry for the first time. A new Public Citizen report finds that over the last twenty years the pharmaceutical industry has accounted for 25% of all violations of state and federal law when it comes to the False Claims Act.
Among the infractions include illegally promoting drugs for purposes not approved by the FDA – which is a criminal offense since it can lead to patients suffering serious illnesses – and even death. Also the pharmaceutical industry routinely overcharged federal programs like Medicaid for their prescription drugs – bilking taxpayers out of billions of dollars. Since 1991 – over 165 pharmaceutical settlements with state and federal governments has led to $19.8 billion in penalties.
According to Taxpayers Against Fraud – pharmaceutical companies are expected to pay out another $9 billion in fraud settlements this year. This is the consequence of a for-profit health care system in America – drug companies who are supposed to be manufacturing products to help us live longer and be healthier – are ACTUALLY more focused on screwing us than our well-being. It's time to join the rest of the developed world – create a non-profit healthcare system – and kick the money-changers out of our hospitals.
Comments
#2
It is time as well to acknowledge that the owner of the illegal opium and legal opium trade is the same entity.
Why are all the pain-killing drugs ultimately opiates?
Why is pain treatment with opium the only ultimate option? What Nazi-like science has held up advances in pain relief which are not addicting or fatal?
Why are prescription drugs such as benzodiazepines made, to make one feel perfectly wonderful, till their tolerance builds up and the medical practitioner then takes the drug away?
Why do so many people need anti-depressants plus other psycho-active medications to enhance the antipressant, plus a cogener to make the pair less toxic?
Why does anyone have trouble sleeping? Sleeping is fantastic!
Sleep deprivation, pain, addiction- all means to population control.
And, we have have our established triumvirate, Sandoz, Eli Lilly, and the CIA, who have experimented extensively with mind control and drugs.
And we have a toxic pair with no cogener, General Dynamics and Wyeth, also under the same control, just to make sure they never lose.
For example, as Romney pointed out, Chase didn't really lose that two billion, they just lost it.
#3
When I’m interrupted with the commercials on TV and the pharmaceuticals advertise their remedy pill for a particular malady, the trailer disclosure for the side effects of the treatment are worst than the malady. What’s up?
#4
60 minutes did an "expose' " on counterfeit drugs and some of the disgusting, filthy, and even dangerous drugs that are not only counterfeited in other countries but that these same drugs are often being sold by well known pharmaceutical bandits with prominent names....names we are otherwise led to believe are safe. It is not isolated incidents and is widespread and I thought I heard a very high percentage...50%?..of the drugs we are now paying top dollar for from name brand pharmaceuticals are actually counterfeit and many of those are drugs that are actually harming us. I did get the impression, though, that they were trying to nudge us into avoiding non-name brand drugs...ie: those bought more cheaply in Canada or elsewhere. As long as we continue to waste our money on the name-brand pharmaceutical mafioso that monopolizes drugs in the world they don't mind a bit that we will end up dying while they profit.
#5
Thank you Intok for all of those ideas and recommendations. I have been searching for an alternative to Google...I'll give DuckDuckGo a go. There are many search engines but many of those all revert back and use Google anyway. Your suggestion about using a Linux distro like Ubuntu on a live thumb drive is a good idea. BackTrack on a live thumb drive is a good idea if you are into learning about and exploring how the internet works ;-} But using Ubuntu, for example, on a live thumb drive or CD is almost the more cautionary way to bank on-line...especially if you still have Windows. But I don't bank on-line because I know how terribly unsafe and unsecure it is.
#6
I guess I am being screwed by big Pharma, but don't know for sure. I am a 68 year old female with a high risk for osteoporosis because of family history and I am on the thin side. I as on hormone replacement therapy for several years and stopped that when the panic went out for that drug. My doctor let me try a few things like black cohosh, but she did not like my bone density results and eventually I was put on Actonel. I have been on that for over 5 years 4 continuous years stopped for about a year or more then the endocrinologist allowed a compromise of every other week. About a little over a year ago I started having back pains and pain that would shoot down my leg. I was sent for physical therapy, but that did not help and felt like it was making it worse, so I was sent to an orthopedist and was given the option of an epidural injection (steroids) or surgery. I took the first injection of the cortisteroids about a month ago. Then really started to look around on the internet and am seeing that people who have been on the bisphosponates are having pain like I am experieincing. I brought it up on my return to see the orthopedist and he smiled and said I made it a little more complicated. I am having some relief so he just told me that before I decide to curtail my normal activitiy I should come back and see him about the surgery. It is a simple surgery so it is something I could consider. But it gets a little more complicated in that my sister-in-law has the same diagnoses as I have spinal stenosis. We are two different body types, she was always on the heavy side and I was always on the thin side, but she has been on Fosamax for 10 years and her spinal stenosis was being treated with 6 injections a year even though every thing I see says they should not and most doctors will not do more than 3 per year. She is in very bad condition and will be having a surgery done that will last for 8 hours and will have to have a screw or screws put in. But first she has to go for another MRI, I think this is for a higher point on her spine. We are all very nervous for her, and my brother had heart bypass done several years ago, and there is the potential she could be paralyzed. I don't want to go further, but just want to say I guess I and my sister-in-law have been screwed by big pharma.
#7
Big Pharma is of course one of the biggest instigators where keeping their drug sales monopoly in place is concerned. I will always despize them just for keeping hemp and Marijuana illegal for all these decades, all for the sake of keeping anyone else from making any money accept for them. Their corporate fascism is at our country's throat. Their money is what they are now using as weapons against the people of America. Money that they couldn't have made if not for all of us buying their man made products, most of which none of us need, nor should we use.
#8
Opiates are used because they work really well, not at stopping pain, but at getting you high enough that you don't care that it hurts, the problem is that the highly refined versions used in medicine are much higher dosages then you'd get if you just smoked a little opium which leads to dependence on them.
It's pretty rare these days to see anyone at least in the US that smokes opum, yet there is no end to people hooked on oxycodone, codine, morphine, hydrocodone and the other purified or synthetic opiate drugs while the instances of people hooked on heroine are down, since they can get the same high from a bottle of pills and not have to use a sketchy syringe.
#9
dupe...
Thom's Blog Is On the Move
By webmaster
Hello All
Thom's blog in this space and moving to a new home.
Please follow us across to hartmannreport.com - this will be the only place going forward to read Thom's blog posts and articles.
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Thom & Louise at a "private audience" with His Holiness Pope John Paul II at his summer palace, Castle Gandolfo, Italy
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Thom, you can take back your own "Filter Bubble" by not using Google and adding a little armor plating to your browser. Personally I use DuckDuckGo https://duckduckgo.com/ as my search engine as the results are pretty relevent and the search tools they have are getting really good. Ideally you want to anonimize your browsing and reduce your browser's surface area to advertisers and other 3rd party servers, your browser shouldonly be talking to the servers you are actually connectinog to, not the advertisers that are running through them as there are many cases where the advertisers used by major sites have been hacked and serve out malware to anyone visiting those sites.
All of these solutions are free and most of them are open source, and all of that convenience is still there, you just log out of the site to keep them from being able to track you when you are not using specifically their site, like Facebook, when you aren't checking it, these tools will keep those Facebook "Like" buttons you see everywhere from tracking what web pages and articles you are reading.
Firefox has an opt out "Do Not Track Me" option, it's located at Edit>Prefrences>Privacy as a caller stated, you can use addons https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/ like Adblock Plus, Ghostery, , the MAFIAAFire addons, BeefTACO, RightToClick etc. Another great one is HTTPS Everywhere, made by the Electronic Fronteir Foundation https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
If you have to use Flash you should use the open source versions like Lightspark or Gnash and also use Better Privacy, and FlashBlock to prevent Flash cookies from installing and to minimize malware vectors.
What is really scary is that Google not only knows your search they have your Android phone with a GPS tracker in it, as well as Chrome browser, Google Earth, Google Desktop, Picasa Photo manager, GTalk chat, Google Docs, GMail, on your desktop. Not ony that but they are now pushing Laptops and Desktops running their custom OS called ChromeOS, which means Google has an inteligence infastructure that puts the feds to shame.
Shame that the OptimizeGoogle http://sourceforge.net/projects/optimizegoogle/ firefox addon project has died due to the developer nolonger having the time to chase after Google's constant changes to their site to prevent the scrambling of all Google tracking methods* while still giving full access to the site. * Void if you are logged in to Google.
The Onion Router is another great tool https://www.torproject.org/
As to using other computers, you can use Portable Apps http://portableapps.com/ on a USB stick on Windows to carry around your own personal and secured browser with you, for even better security you can make a Linux Live USB stick and just reboot the computer so that you are running not just a few custom apps on someone else's install, but your own completely custom operating system, I used this when I was in university as I didn't have the money to replace my dead laptop, they allowed me to use any computer with a boot from USB option to run everything I needed.
Now if only we could get more people to use Linux, Mint and Ubutnu are the best choices for someone comming fromWindows or OS X.