{"id":695708,"date":"2010-03-19T08:59:09","date_gmt":"2010-03-19T12:59:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.szone.us\/f20\/sold-highest-bidder-41093\/"},"modified":"2010-03-19T08:59:09","modified_gmt":"2010-03-19T12:59:09","slug":"sold-to-the-highest-bidder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/695708","title":{"rendered":"Sold to the highest bidder"},"content":{"rendered":"<div><b>Sold to the highest bidder<\/b> <\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t need to tell you prescription prices are through the roof. But here&#8217;s what you might not know: Big Pharma is buying off the competition so they can keep their prices sky high. <\/p>\n<p>It ought to be criminal &#8212; and if the Federal Trade Commission has anything to say about it &#8212; it soon will be. <\/p>\n<p>Brand-name drugs have a set amount of time during which they have exclusive rights on a certain formula. After this time, it&#8217;s up for grabs. At that point, other drug companies are free to produce the same drug, but without the slick brand name. Generic pharmaceuticals are generally significantly cheaper than their brand-name counterparts. <\/p>\n<p>But the brand-name makers do so well with their inflated profits that they can afford to pay other drug makers millions NOT to produce generic forms of the drugs &#8212; leaving you no choice but to pay an arm and a leg for certain medications. <\/p>\n<p>According to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), that alone is costing consumers an extra $3.5 billion a year. And since the government pays for about one third of all prescription drug costs, it costs Uncle Sam about 1.2 billion extra per year. <\/p>\n<p>No wonder the government is stepping in to put a stop to these pay-for-delay deals. <\/p>\n<p>Never delaying my opinion,<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/clicks.douglassreport.com\/\/t\/AQ\/AAErtw\/AAEx3g\/C+U\/AQ\/Ad481Q\/rM-2\" >William Campbell Douglass II, M.D.<br \/>\n<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sold to the highest bidder I don&#8217;t need to tell you prescription prices are through the roof. But here&#8217;s what you might not know: Big Pharma is buying off the competition so they can keep their prices sky high. It ought to be criminal &#8212; and if the Federal Trade Commission has anything to say [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2750,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4821],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-695708","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9NivD-2UZ6","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/695708","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2750"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=695708"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/695708\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=695708"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=695708"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=695708"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}