American - Editor | April 20, 1939 -
Just look at herbal remedies. It's essentially a throwback. It's saying you go to a plant and you mush it up and you stick it in the jar and you sell it and you eat it and it's going to cure what ails you. And that's the kind of stuff that people believed in the early 19th century.
Marcia Angell
PeopleSayingPlantYouLookEarly
The United States is the only advanced country that permits the pharmaceutical industry to charge exactly what the market will bear, whatever it wants.
CountryWillBearWhateverIndustry
You see that the people who are drawn to alternative medicine are often fairly healthy and they go to alternative medicine for what I call the 'symptoms of life.' Fatigue, joint pains, inability to concentrate, perhaps, the kinds of things that anyone over twenty-five gets at some point.
LifePeopleMedicineYouGoHealthy
Drug companies say they need to charge ever-higher prices to cover their research costs, but they spend far less on research and development than they do on marketing and administration, and afterwards they actually keep more in profits.
ResearchMarketingSayDevelopment
When death is imminent and dying patients find their suffering unbearable, then the physician's role should shift from healing to relieving suffering in accord with the patient's wishes.
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For all of life's discontents, according to the pharmaceutical industry, there is a drug and you should take it. Then for the side effects of that drug, then there's another drug, and so on. So we're all taking more drugs, and more expensive drugs.
LifeYouMoreExpensiveSideTake
The pharmaceutical industry likes to depict itself as a research-based industry, as the source of innovative drugs. Nothing could be further from the truth. This is their incredible PR and their nerve.
TruthNothingSourceIndustryLikes
The pharmaceutical industry isn't the only place where there's waste and inefficiency and profiteering. That happens in much of the rest of the health care industry.
HealthRestCarePlaceIndustry
Unlike the federal government, most states don't have the option of running a deficit.
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Brand-name drugs have no competition, since the government grants them very long, exclusive marketing rights.
GovernmentCompetitionLongMarketing
Japan has very long hospital stays. Ah, it's almost a rest cure. People in Japan who are hospitalized might lie around the hospital for a week or two just to take a rest.
LiePeopleRestWeekLongHospital
Health care is a need; it's not a commodity, and it should be distributed according to need. If you're very sick, you should have a lot of it. If you're not sick, you shouldn't have a lot of it.
HealthSickCareYouNeedShould
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