Dr. Peter J. Weiss

New York Con­gress­man Jer­rod Nadler won the More Health Less Care Award for his action to help Amer­i­cans off of expen­sive pre­scrip­tion drugs.

I’m a pos­i­tive per­son.  I would much rather praise peo­ple for good work than crit­i­cize them for errors or prob­lems.

And frankly, we all get way too much crit­i­cism and way too lit­tle praise and encour­age­ment.  That’s why I’ve decided to cre­ate the More Health Less Care Award to rec­og­nize indi­vid­u­als for doing the right thing to help them­selves and help our nation away from more health­care and towards bet­ter health and well­ness.

Today I am happy to rec­og­nize New York Con­gress­man Jer­rod Nadler with the More Health Less Care Award for his action to help Amer­i­cans off of expen­sive pre­scrip­tion drugs. Con­gress­man Nadler has re-introduced the Say No to Drug Ads Act, a bill that would end the tax deductibil­ity of expenses for direct-to-consumer drug ads.

Here’s the story from Rep. Nadler’s web­site:

In 2007 alone, the phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal indus­try spent more than $4.7 bil­lion on direct-to-consumer adver­tis­ing.  By cre­at­ing a demand for their drugs, the phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­nies are able to keep prices arti­fi­cially high, steer­ing con­sumers – and physi­cians – away from generic ver­sions of drugs.  The Say No to Drug Ads Act, first intro­duced by Nadler in 2002, would help con­sumers and doc­tors make more informed choices in select­ing from avail­able med­ica­tions.

There is absolutely no rea­son for the fed­eral gov­ern­ment to pro­vide major tax breaks to phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­nies cre­at­ing adver­tise­ments for their own finan­cial enrich­ment,” said Nadler.  “It’s bad enough that TV drug ads mis­lead con­sumers and tout ben­e­fits of high-priced drugs with­out prop­erly con­vey­ing the risks, but the drug com­pa­nies don’t need extra sub­si­dies to do so.  My leg­is­la­tion would end this unde­served perk for the indus­try, while gen­er­at­ing bil­lions of dol­lars to sup­port much more essen­tial health care pro­grams.

Now we can argue about if this spe­cific bill is the right way to address the prob­lem, but the Con­gress­man has the big pic­ture right.

Here’s where we are in agree­ment:

• • The big phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal man­u­fac­tures have con­sis­tently acted in ways to delude the pub­lic into tak­ing expen­sive branded med­ica­tions when inex­pen­sive gener­ics would serve as well.
  • Direct to con­sumer adver­tis­ing has helped to cre­ate our cur­rent cul­ture of over pre­scrib­ing, a cul­ture where pills are the pre­ferred solu­tion to our prob­lems.
  • Our gov­ern­ment has cre­ated many tax incen­tives for more health­care but few or none for more health and less care.  It’s time to fix that.

So thank you Con­gress­man Nadler for see­ing the big pic­ture and try­ing to do some­thing about it.  Con­grat­u­la­tions on win­ning the More Health Less Care Award which con­sists of recog­ni­tion in my blog and an inscribed copy of “More Health Less Care.”  Your copy of “More Health Less Care” is going out in the mail today.

Atten­tion read­ers — If you know some­one deserv­ing of the More Health Less Care Award you may nom­i­nate him or her by leav­ing a com­ment here.  Or con­tact me directly at pete@​drpeterjweiss.​com.