Capitalism premeditatedly murders children — the vincristine shortage

© 2019 Peter Free

 

18 October 2019

 

 

Today, in supporting my essay title

 

I will not use U.S. participation in the Yemen war, where the Saudis are happily killing kids every day with our help.

 

 

Instead, consider the domestic vincristine shortage

 

Vincristine is an effective chemo drug.

 

Its current scarcity the United States is very probably freighting children into God's hands before their proper time:

 

 

Those withdrawals [from pharmaceutical production] may leave just one or two companies continuing to supply the drugs in the United States.

 

Their factories must run at peak production to turn a profit and provide a sufficient supply, but the moment there is a quality problem and production shuts down, shortages follow.

 

© 2019 Roni Caryn Rabin, Faced With a Drug Shortfall, Doctors Scramble to Treat Children With Cancer, New York Times (14 October 2019)

 

 

Notice that the Times did not dig very deep . . .

 

. . . into the scarcity's causes.

 

This oversight — almost certainly intentional, given the long-demonstrated character of the Oligarchy-supporting newspaper — equally symbolizes the putridness of the institutions that rule and inform us.

 

 

Robert Kuttner was more honest

 

These kids are being exposed to untimely death, purely for profit.

 

I quote Kuttner at length, due to the clarity and importance of what he has to say:

 

 

The shortage of vincristine is so severe that some hospitals are on the verge of rationing the drug—having to make a Sophie’s Choice of which children will live and which ones will die.

 

The stories . . . have mostly missed the underlying question of why there have been increasing shortages of such drugs at all . . . .

 

[Vincristine] was first developed in 1961, and has long been a generic.

 

[T]he average price of vincristine in the developing world . . . is $1.80 a dose, compared to $42.60 per dose in the U.S.

 

[T]he failure of the antitrust authorities to prevent the increasing concentration of the drug industry has left that industry with fewer and fewer makers of generics.

 

Many generic producers have been bought up by the big, high-profit drug-makers . . . who then use their market power to raise the price of generics that should be cheap.

 

[T]he dominant producer then keeps the supply relatively scarce in order to keep the price high, and sometimes cuts its strategy too close, creating shortages.

 

Hospitals acquire medications like vincristine through special firms called group purchasing organizations . . . .

 

GPOs eventually merged into four large firms, which purchase 90 percent of all needed medicines for hospitals.

 

They buy them on sole-source contracts; if a generic manufacturer doesn’t secure one, they have almost no way to get into the hospitals.

 

Many contracts include required “90-10” purchases; if a hospital purchases 1000 doses of vincristine one year, it would have to purchase 900 the next, or lose an administrative discount and pay a penalty.

 

The effect is to entrench the dominant supplier, and make it impossible for competitors to survive.

 

Since the hospitals have a locked-in supplier, they cannot seek out alternatives, even in an emergency situation.

 

GPOs pull huge fees out of the cost of the supplies, which accounts for the price rise.

 

Hospital administrators get “share-back” payments as well . . . .

 

The whole thing is secured by a safe harbor provision, making kickbacks between medical suppliers and GPO firms legal.

 

[T]here are only two possible remedies:

 

Either restore significant competition to the drug industry, including reforming or abolishing GPOs, so that other generics are as cheap and common as aspirin.

 

Or conclude that because generics are (or should be) low-profit items, profit motivated companies just can’t do this properly—and have the government, or a group of non-profits sponsored by the government, manufacture them.

 

[S]omeone “has a plan” to do just that. Elizabeth Warren, of course.

 

© 2019 Robert Kuttner, How the Drug Industry Sacrifices Children with Cancer, American Prospect (18 October 2019) (excerpts, reformatted)

 

 

The moral? — See what happens to your sense of fairness — when you find out what's really going on?

 

Unregulated capitalism depends upon us not being aware of the ways in which it creates opportunities to kill or steal from us.

 

That's why plutocratic propaganda and torrents of disinformation have become the overwhelming norm in our culture.

 

It is not just the Military Industrial Complex that gnaws away the pretended ethics of American society.