What are we going to do when the baby boomers retire

[motivez]

The fact that people go to Canada / Mexico to get the drugs says there's a market demand for cheaper drugs, why should the government restrict access to them?

Seems a little conflicting

[kinggovernor]

Originally Posted by motivez

The fact that people go to Canada / Mexico to get the drugs says there's a market demand for cheaper drugs, why should the government restrict access to them?

Seems a little conflicting

so when they die because they get the wrong stuff, who is to blame?

[motivez]

I thought the libertarian philosophy was personal responsibility?

[kinggovernor]

Originally Posted by motivez

I thought the libertarian philosophy was personal responsibility?

medication is not a normal good, where the average consumer can have knowledge of the product and will not know what the effects of the product they purchase until after they consumed, ex post.

thus, there is a strong case for government regulation when it comes to medicine for these two facts.

[motivez]

So why shouldn't the government continue in its current role but allow foreign drugs to be placed on the market?

[nbiggershaft]

Push back the age for recieving benefits. It's not nice, but it fixes the problem. And people don't really need 30 years of retirement.

[kinggovernor]

Originally Posted by motivez

So why shouldn't the government continue in its current role but allow foreign drugs to be placed on the market?

and when that happens and some fake medicine (which happens in Russia all the time) is flooded on the market, who are the people going to blame and sue?

[DosEquis]

I can't wait till they retire. We will see a lovely climb in wages because there will be fewer people to fill their positions they just left. I read some place that like 90% of CIO's and other vice president level managers in IT are in the baby boomer classification. The number of people seeking IT degrees has declined a bit... that means this NGA is gonna get paid within the next 10 years.

[6SpeedTA95]

Originally Posted by motivez

Stop what exactly?

They are entitled to the benefits they've been paying into, Social Security, etc..

No they're not, they're the ones that refused to hold washington accountable for the tax dollars being spent, so they will be using OUR dollars to fund their retirement. I'm ok with that until they try to raise taxes on ME to fund their retirement.

[6SpeedTA95]

Originally Posted by DosEquis

I can't wait till they retire. We will see a lovely climb in wages because there will be fewer people to fill their positions they just left. I read some place that like 90% of CIO's and other vice president level managers in IT are in the baby boomer classification. The number of people seeking IT degrees has declined a bit... that means this NGA is gonna get paid within the next 10 years.

This is very true...wages will go up but in many cases wages will go up to keep the older folks in the market...but you're right we will definately see wage increases.

[kinggovernor]

Originally Posted by nbiggershaft

Push back the age for recieving benefits. It's not nice, but it fixes the problem. And people don't really need 30 years of retirement.

That is a good step, people are living longer and healthier. So they can work later in life

[RMNIXON]

Originally Posted by motivez

Stop what exactly?

They are entitled to the benefits they've been paying into, Social Security, etc..

Most of that money has already been spent!

[RMNIXON]

Originally Posted by kinggovernor

they have always been the "me first" generation, and talking to my parent's friends about politics has me convinced they are going to leech everything out of the government. We need to deliver a plan to stop this. What do y'all think?

It will move us more in the direction of the entitlement problems they have in Germany and France already. It is going to cause a political rift between old and younger people. How bad it will get I don't know? If we want to get ahead of this we need serious entitlement reform and planning NOW but there is no political will to do it on both sides. Young people protest, old people VOTE and they are easy to confuse and scare!

The problem is not just "when" they retire! It is not a magical date that we go into the Red. When they live longer they will expect to be of SS and Medicare for 20 years or more and the costs will mount....

[6SpeedTA95]

Originally Posted by kinggovernor

so when they die because they get the wrong stuff, who is to blame?

odds of that happening are next to nothing, they are the same drugs in other countries unless you go to some ghetto store...

[kinggovernor]

Originally Posted by DosEquis

I can't wait till they retire. We will see a lovely climb in wages because there will be fewer people to fill their positions they just left. I read some place that like 90% of CIO's and other vice president level managers in IT are in the baby boomer classification. The number of people seeking IT degrees has declined a bit... that means this NGA is gonna get paid within the next 10 years.

of course most of upper management is a in the baby boomer generation

[kinggovernor]

Originally Posted by 6SpeedTA95

odds of that happening are next to nothing, they are the same drugs in other countries unless you go to some ghetto store...

September 5, 2006
Drug Piracy: A Wave of Counterfeit Medicines Washes Over Russia
By ANDREW E. KRAMER
MOSCOW, Sept. 4 — Time and again, Dr. Boris A. Merkeshkin pricked his patients’ arms with a needle and injected a drug intended to ease cardiovascular ailments. He did it for six months earlier this year and his patients recovered smoothly.

They may not be so lucky next time. Dr. Merkeshkin, the chief physician at a large research hospital in Siberia, and his colleagues had unknowingly administered roughly 3,000 doses of fake Cavinton. The drug, made in its genuine form by Gedeon Richter of Hungary, is one of the more common counterfeit pharmaceuticals circulating in Russia, according to the police.

Dr. Merkeshkin said he was grateful that the substitute medicine was similar to the intended one and did no harm to the patients. “If that were not the case, we would have a tragedy,” he said.

Russians, already adept at burning pirated DVD’s, rolling their own Marlboro cigarettes and printing knockoff Nike T-shirts, have turned to the more delicate art of making fake prescription medicine. Counterfeit prescription drugs are proliferating in Russia, and in many other countries, according to industry experts and the Food and Drug Administration.

They say fake drugs are also being smuggled to Europe and the United States, the world’s most lucrative prescription drug market, though so far in smaller amounts.

So far, the biggest problem presented by the fake drugs is violation of intellectual property rights, cutting into the profits of pharmaceutical companies. There do not appear to have been major injuries from the drugs, many of which are similar in makeup to the drugs they mimic.

Drug counterfeiting is different from the production of low-cost medicines. Some developing countries, as part of a principled stance in a broader public health debate, will allow their manufacturers to make certain generic medicines, for example, for AIDS patients, without paying license holders.

Counterfeiters, in contrast, operate illegally for profit, and the contents of the fake drugs can be different from the originals.

The variety of fakes range from crude mixtures of glue, chalk and sugar to nearly exact chemical replicas of complex pharmaceuticals, like Lipitor by Pfizer or the anti-impotence pill Viagra, both of which have been the targets of anticounterfeiting prosecutions.

Counterfeiters operate in India, China and elsewhere. Russia’s underground prescription medicine market is distinguished for being at the forefront of a new trend of exceedingly high-quality fakes.

Indeed, private investigators from Pfizer surveying the Russian market found fakes that were, by the company’s own admission, of exceptional quality.

“The counterfeits we got in the survey were the finest counterfeits I’ve ever seen,” John Theriault, vice president for global security at Pfizer and a former F.B.I. agent, said in a telephone interview. “The stuff we saw in the Russian market wasn’t made in a garage. We don’t know where it was made.”

If they are good enough, doctors and patients there may not suspect or notice they are using fakes any more than their Russian counterparts.

“If the product looks like American product, how do you know where it came from?” he said. In a statement to Congress in July, the F.D.A.’s associate commissioner for policy and planning, Randall W. Lutter, said the quantity of counterfeit prescription drugs intercepted by customs officials suggest that such smuggling is on the rise. Agents opened 58 cases in the United States in 2004, up from 30 the previous year.

Statistics on fake drugs are hard to come by. “The sophistication and precision of some counterfeit copies of legitimate drugs make a reliable estimate of the number of counterfeits impossible,” Mr. Lutter said, according to a transcript.

The Coalition for Intellectual Property Rights, an independent group, surveyed the Russian market in 2003 and found that 12 percent of pharmaceuticals were counterfeited, though local industry groups say the number is lower, perhaps as little as a fraction of 1 percent.

Typically, pharmaceutical trade associations, which represent companies with reputations and sales that could suffer if information on counterfeit products became public, offer lower estimates. The World Health Organization has estimated that counterfeiting pharmaceuticals, on a global basis, is a $32 billion business.

Inside Russia, the high quality of the counterfeit drugs has blunted any sense of outrage or urgency by authorities to make arrests, according to two industry groups in Moscow.

“There’s a perception around here that if nobody’s harmed, what is the problem?” said Sergei A. Boboshko, executive director of the Association of International Pharmaceuticals Manufacturers, an industry group in Moscow representing 46 large drug companies.

The industry is more worried about publicity over counterfeiting, fearing that sales will fall if customers are alarmed by the prevalence of counterfeited medicine.

Companies do not usually disclose their discoveries of counterfeit versions of their pills, according to Cinthya K. Ramirez, a policy analyst at the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations, a group based in Geneva.

“You can imagine the impact that it could have,” Ms. Ramirez said. “People would be scared and they won’t take their medicine, and would be ill. The question of information is very sensitive.”

Industry groups like Mr. Boboshko’s and other authorities are also at odds over how to enforce the law; the Russian government has played up several high-profile raids on backyard medicine shops as talks continue about Russia’s entry into the World Trade Organization. Mr. Boboshko says the raids are merely window dressing because industrial scale producers continue to operate almost openly.

Last fall, the Moscow police department’s 18-man economic crime squad broke down the door of a rented warehouse. They found a cat and a dog — along with eight illegal immigrants from Moldova who were mixing chalk and wheat flour into aspirin, Fillip A. Zolotnitsky, a spokesman for the economic crime division, said in a telephone interview.

“The walls were covered with mold. It was a standard abandoned room,” Mr. Zolotnitsky said. The raid netted five million tablets packaged as aspirin. The suspects are awaiting trial. If they are convicted they could be sentenced to 10 years in prison. Meanwhile, Roszdravnadzor, the Russian equivalent of the F.D.A., recently published on its Web site penalties for licensed manufacturers who violate patents, including possible suspension of their license or a fine.

The best counterfeits are made at legitimate plants, which might run an extra night shift to make fakes, according to Mr. Boboshko. Detectives tracing the trail of the Cavinton that turned up in Dr. Merkeshkin’s hospital were led to a Moscow warehouse registered to Tatyana Bryntsalova, the wife of Vladimir A. Bryntsalov, a pharmaceutical magnate who ran as a dark horse candidate for president of Russia in 2004, according to police records.

Calls to Mr. Bryntsalov’s company, Ferein, were not returned. In the Russian media, he has denied wrongdoing. His company operates licensed factories that produce 10 percent of Russia’s legitimate pharmaceuticals.

The growing proliferation of fake drug supplies around the world has led the F.D.A. to consider an expensive new radio tagging system for tracking prescription medicine in the United States. The system, now in a trial phase, is considered the most significant change in drug packaging since tamper-proofing was developed in the 1980’s.

In a laboratory off Moscow’s traffic-clogged Leninsky Avenue, Leonid A. Mikhalitsyn, a physicist, stands at the industry’s front line against fakes. He is a spectrograph operator for the German scientific instrument maker Bruker and works in an ultramodern, glass-enclosed office. The spectrograph somewhat resembles a desktop PC with a round, pill-size scanner built into the top. It costs about $80,000 and is the gold standard for spotting counterfeit medicine.

On a recent morning, Mr. Mikhalitsyn was testing Biseptol, the Russian trade name for a Polish-made antibiotic marketed in the United States as Bactrim. Mr. Mikhalitsyn said that the fake Biseptol was nearly impossible for a doctor or patient to tell from the real one and would work just as well. Bactrim is used to treat children’s ear infections and urinary tract infections, according to Jose F. Flores, an American internist at the SOS clinic in Moscow. While the counterfeit drug would not put patient’s health at risk, he said, it could put a drug maker’s profit at risk and undermine the incentive for research and development spending.

On a Formica counter in Mr. Mikhalitsyn’s lab lay a Ziploc bag of tiny ampoules, along with stamps and labels certifying quality. The bags contained fake Cavinton found at the Moscow warehouse, from the same batch shipped to Mr. Merkeshkin’s hospital.

After three minutes of examination, Mr. Mikhalitsyn had his answer.

“It’s a fake,” he said, pointing to a red graph on his monitor depicting the chemical makeup of the pill. The computer screen displayed the readout from a genuine pill. The two lines nearly overlapped, which meant the chemicals were close to identical, Mr. Mikhalitsyn said.

“They are either short one ingredient or have added an additional ingredient,” he said. “It’s really no different from the original.”

Drug Piracy: A Wave of Counterfeit Medicines Washes Over Russia - New York Times

It definetly can happen

[Pro Street]

Originally Posted by kinggovernor

Drug Piracy: A Wave of Counterfeit Medicines Washes Over Russia - New York Times

It definetly can happen

And yet Canada is off limits... who gives a fuck about Russian drugs?

[R-Type]

The viewpoint missing from this thread is from those who actually live life at 65+. Most of you are probably under 30 and you can't have a real concept of what life is like at that age. At some point, you will NOT be able to hold a job no matter how much you want to. Your body just won't have the stamina for the stress. Getting dressed in the morning becomes a 3hour venture. going to the grocery store becomes the highlight of your day because that's what you've got the energy for. maybe if you're really lucky, you've got some family who will help take care of you. To expect 70+yos to compete with 30 yos for jobs is laughable at best, and downright cruel at worst.

You all talk like you're going to save your sheckles and live like paupers now so you can afford to live when you retire...or maybe you think you're going to invest in the market and make it big enough so you can live in some comfort later. Nice pipe dreams.. life is known to throw curveballs at the least opportune times. Markets rise and crumble, and without some kind of group-based, non-profit healthcare system, you are only one heart attack, car accident, disease, or injury away from complete financial ruin. Despite what myopic conservatives tend to think, liberty is not merely the sum of how tightly one can hold on to his wallet. Quality of life is just as important, and we can't have that if only the richest 1% can afford reasonable healthcare.

You can sit here and argue back and forth about who is wasting money and why or what justifies the difference between who 'payed in' vs who simply expects 'entitlement', but that gets us nowhere. You conservatives state some kind of private system is best while conveniently forgetting to mention that insurance companies post billions in profits from fixed-income retirees every year...billions that could be put to use paying for care instead of some exec's sports car...and don't' even get me started on insurance rate hikes. Private systems, where profit comes first, can be just as wasteful and corrupt as a public system where corrupt government officials justify the use of medical/retirement funds for their own agendas. Profit-over-care is NOT a solution no matter who holds the keys. Right wing and left wing need to get over their ideological egos and realize a hybrid system is needed to maintain some kind of balance between avg cost-to-citizen and effective coverage. It is really unfortunate that pragmatism and common sense are lost on both sides of the spectrum, because it means that OUR generation is the first one that will pay for these 'baby boomer' politicians' stupidity and arrogance.

...and for the record, I'm under 30 too...and someday we will all be 70. it's not 'us' vs 'them' because we will BE them someday. At 70, I for one don't want to be fighting for a few scraps of food at some poorly run, uncared for state facility because I had a heart attack at 65 which needed 150k in services.