Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Hey, cold sufferers, get ready for some more Hopey-Changey!

The reason: You’re too stupid to figure out how to use Nyquil and other cold and flu relief products.

The drugs that could be pulled off shelves are combination medications, such as Procter & Gamble’s NyQuil or Novartis’ Theraflu, which mix acetaminophen with other ingredients that treat cough and runny nose.

The FDA is not required to follow the advice of its panels, though it usually does. The panel vote is scheduled for Tuesday afternoon.

Here’s the real reason for the potential Nyquil ban.

Manufacturers could lose hundreds of millions of dollars in sales if combination drugs are pulled from the market. Total sales of all acetaminophen drugs reached $2.6 billion last year, with 80 percent of the market comprised of over-the-counter products.

I tend to think he's right about 'why':
It’s all about crippling the drug companies so that their only source of revenue is from the eventual government-run health care system. When the bulk of your income comes from one source, it’s pretty hard to publicly oppose that source. With over-the-counter remedies removed, drug companies will become more reliant on income from prescription drugs. And the biggest customer for prescription drugs will be the US Government, paying off the tabs of the patients in the government-run option.

Pointed out by Rodger

2 comments:

Daniel Newby said...

That article is inaccurate.

All the acetaminophen proposals I've seen are to ban it only in combination products. Many people just can't correctly read labels and do arithmetic when they are sick, which is compounded by most of the combinations including sedatives intended to shut down thinking processes. We have done the experiment, folks can't do it, and the resulting carnage costs on the order of a billion dollars a decade.

You would still be able to buy acetaminophen by itself. Sick people seem to do a lot better when you reduce the instructions to "Eight pills a day. Never more."

Windy Wilson said...

There is also the strong element of veterinary medicine in the new health order.
The state owns us all, and if the cure is too expensive, well, we'll just have to give the faithful old dog painkillers until he kicks off, and if they don't work, it's a one-way trip to the vet.