Roadrage by: Night Hawke
may 2000

    The Bitter Pill

I stood gaping at the auditorium sprawling out like a parking lot at a mall. Seats went on forever and ever. Up at the front there was a stage I think… but my glasses weren't powerful enough to tell for sure. This wasn't a civic center, public theater, or even a university auditorium. Nope. This was a hall built at the manufacturing facility for braces. Yep. Those shiny metal things you hate to pay for and your kids hate to wear but Hillary Clinton says your kids should get to sue you for not buying if they need them.

Now I had just toured the manufacturing facility -- where these things get produced for a cost under twenty bucks. Since I signed a confidentiality agreement I can't tell you what they cost. But I can tell you they get sold to your local Orthodontist for about three hundred bucks. Who then turns around and sells them to you for about ten times that much. Now since the company was making these for under twenty bucks and needed to maximize it's profits (apparently 280 bucks a shot wasn't enough) I was there to help them automate their process and send some of those lazy workers they had home.

We came to this auditorium and I asked what it was for -- employee meetings wouldn't require a room this large. I was told a couple of three or four times a year they bring in Orthodontic students from all over the country and give training seminars. They cycle goes like this. If you get these young professionals while they're in school and teach them how to use your product then when they get out of school they'll be apt to use your stuff because it's what they know. And the schools are in cahoots with this scheme because after all, what products are available is what they have to train people to use out in the field.

Now this doesn't only apply to the dental industry. It happens in medicine too. I've been called in to automate such tasks as taking syringes and filling them with medicine and placing them in a sterile package. Here, the automation goal is quality. Yes. Quality. To make sure the exact amount gets placed in the syringe and that it gets placed into the package in a sterile state without any human contamination. Now, I can buy that. I really can. But, when you stop to consider again that the whole process costs these pharmaceutical companies around twenty bucks -- and they sell those shots to my dad for about three thousand dollars a pop (yes one hormone shot to suppress his testosterone production and thus prevent the spread of his cancer costs three thousand bucks a pop) it gets a little bit infuriating.

And, the pharmaceutical companies pull the same stunts as I described in orthodontia. They basically train the doctors how to use their products -- and that's what doctors do. They retail prescription drugs.

Now I don't have any qualms with private enterprise. I'm all for it. But these folks need some serious competition. Especially when they are not providing the cures people need.

I'm not even going to get into insurance yet. But I'm going to point out that our premiums are so high because the cost of care is so high because the fat cats are getting so much profit. Why? Because they know we want to live and keep our loved ones alive and we'll pay any price -- sometimes everything to try to do it.

When dad first started his treatment I already knew that there was a 100% cure for cancer. My neice helped develop it. She sells baby monitors now though. There just isn't any money in research -- for the researchers. But this cure -- gene therapy -- chops of the telomerase in the cancer DNA so it can't reproduce. Not going to explain it all here. Run a web search on it.

Yet in three cases of people close to me in the last three years -- it hasn't been used. Why? Because we don't know if it's safe. For spock's sake people -- these people are dying anyway… fuck the FDA. They are just as co-opted as the rest of the industry. The fact of the matter is gene therapy does take longer than other treatments and with aggressive cancer's it can take too long. But, if you know the other therapies like radiation aren't 100% effective then why not start treatment down both tracks. If the radiation doesn't work -- the gene thing is going on… and so am I…

I'll rant some more next week.

--Hawke

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