pharmaceuticals

The Revisionist National Income And Product Accounts

The Bureau of Economic Analysis has revised the National Income and Product Accounts all the way back to 1928.  With the release of Q2 GDP, Gross Domestic Product magically added $559.8 billion to 2012 GDP in current dollars.  Additionally the chained dollar base year was changed from 2005 to 2009, a very funky year where some deflation from 2008 was still present.

Vampire Economics?

This story caught my eye. The New York Times outlines how each blood donation, paid out at $30 a pop, generates $300 in pharmaceutical products.

Blood donation centers concentrate in extremely poor areas, with high health issues including drug addiction.

So, get this, Mexicans are crossing the border twice a week to donate blood, to earn $60 a week. It's more money than what they can make on wages in Mexico!

Twice a week, Ms. Delgado, the mother of three young girls, walks across the bridge from Piedras Negras, Mexico, where she lives, to Eagle Pass and enters a building just two blocks from the border.

Inside, for about an hour, Ms. Delgado lies hooked to a machine that extracts plasma, the liquid part of the blood, from a vein in her arm. The $60 a week she is paid almost equals her husband’s earnings.

“This is like another income,” she says.

Big Pharma to make billions, thanks Obama and Congress!

No, you did not enter a time warp and read about President Bush and the Republicans passing a corrupt prescription drug bill written by lobbyists. Yes, it's 2009. You ready for this?

Pharma Deal With White House On Course To Net Industry Billions:

The deal struck between the pharmaceutical lobby, the White House and Senate Democrats has drastically improved Big Pharma's expected profits, a private industry report finds.

IMS Health, a company that supplies the pharmaceutical companies with sales data, predicts that new health reform legislation -- combined with a projected upswing in the economy and other changes in the pharmaceutical industry -- will result in a net gain of more than $137 billion in total market sales over the next four years.

Read the entire Huffington Post article for the response from PHrMA, the pharmaceutical lobbyist group.