CEO's of the Tobacco industry swearing to Congress that nicotine isn't addictive.
There are 443,000 preventable deaths in the US every year from smoking. Imagine if this number of people were being killed every year by 9/11 type attacks. The country would be at all out war and attacking other countries round the world. But what are they doing about the war being waged against the American people by the profit addicted tobacco companies and their hard drug?
The Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement of 1998 agreed that the tobacco companies, remember the tobacco companies whose leaders swore under oath that they did not think tobacco was addictive, but anyway they agreed to pay $246 billion over 25 years to the 46 states involved in the agreement. This $246 billion was to help pay for the health care of the people made ill by their hard drug tobacco. They were forced to agree to this because of the cost of health care for those who were made sick by their product, their hard drug. Of course these companies and their drug dealing management and shareholders are weaseling out of their agreement. In fiscal year 2010, they only paid $8.1 billion.
Now in spite of the country being "awash with cash", as the Wall Street Journal puts it, cuts are being made in all social programs and federal aid to the states. One result of this is that spending on anti smoking programs is being cut. And the result of this is that in those states such as California where anti smoking programs were in place the fall in the smoking rate is stalling. California's anti smoking programs resulted in a fall in the adult smoking rate from 22.8% in 1998 to 12.9% in 2009. Several other states cut their smoking rates by up to a third with similar programs. In these states the cuts in spending on the anti smoking programs are leading to the fall in the smoking rate either stalling or being reversed. There were 46.6 million smokers in the US in 2009. This is largely unchanged since 2004. The stalling of the reduction in smokers means a rise in deaths and spending on health care.
The owners, managers and shareholders of the tobacco companies are drug dealers. The street dealers have got nothing on them. But these tobacco company people are never up in court for destroying peoples lives, never sent to prison for destroying peoples lives. Yet this is what they do. They get away with their drug dealing because they are able to bribe the politicians to pass laws to make their hard drug and their form of drug dealing legal. This is how they can get away with killing 443,000 people every year and making millions more ill with cancer and other illnesses. The average life span of a regular smoker is 12 years less than a non smoker. This is the devastation these profit addicted, politician bribing drug dealers are responsible for. Capitalism is a rotten system. It has forfeited its right to exist.
2 comments:
Yes,this does drive up health care costs and sick and dying people. The only place that these companies are compelled to spend money is at election time. We have a very bad rotten system to deal with.
Lets talk about profit in the drug industry a bit.
You may actually read a annual report from time to time and see that Big Pharma produces a respectable profit of 6 to 15% in a years time and think "Well that's not so impressive" but that would be because you don't know how they calculate "profit"
Don't feel inadequate most Americans really don't get the whole picture because of many reason ie who gets the money.
Most of the big Pharma companies have two calculations of profit the one listed above shows everything alledgely after all cost is calculated. The profit they really look at is a form of COPS (Cost of product sold). This calculation includes all cost like Research and Development, Manufacturing and Shipment etc.
This usually runs from 5 to 25% of the cost of the drug, the real cost of the drug!!
Where does the other 75-95% go?
Answer to Executive Overhead and Marketing. Yes some of that money goes to stock holders, of which the Board of Directors and other wealthy investment companies hold the rest. Now when you ask them why things are so expensive they will tell you "because of government regulation and research and development". This is much like our friends at FOX total spin.
In fact if you could research most drugs pedigrees you'd find that big Pharma invented almost none of them except a few duplicate chemical moeities.
How do they accomplish this illusion? Well what happens is they buy the products from smaller entities. In fact most drugs are invented by small biotech firms and research firms in Europe and American University areas. Big Pharma simply purchases them and then markets them to the public.
In general Americans pay 100 to 700% more than the other countries they sell to. And least you hear that they spend more on regulation on drugs made here check out their facilities in Puerto Rico. Want to hear more about one of the most profitable industries in the world and how they "share" this profit with their workers?
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