Thu, 05 Mar 2009

No Legal Shield in Drug Labeling, Justices Rule

Big Pharma makes it tough to feel sorry for them, but in this case, look at the underlying issues. Your product has been tested and approved, at great expense to you, so you can sell it. Selling it without this testing and approval would've landed you in jail. A third party sells your product to a consumer, who's injured by it's misapplication. The consumer sues you - and wins millions!

You want a handle on rising drug costs: don't force drug companies to pay millions and wit for years to get drugs approved - let the courts handle any injuries. Or, if you are going to make them get approval before marketing their drugs, let that approval stand as a shield from lawsuits like this one. Doing both is just jacking up the cost and keeping bureaucrats employed.

The Supreme Court said a drug company was not protected from injury claims merely because the government had approved the products and labeling.

(link) [New York Times]

/Politics | 0 writebacks | permanent link

comment...

 
Notes: If you put a <mailto:> link in the URL field your address will not be mangled: this could be a bad idea as your email address could be easily harvested by bots designed for SPAM. The comments field should now format correctly for line feeds and carriage returns: when you hit the 'Enter' or 'Return' keys in your comment it should break to a new line. The text should wrap cleanly. Please let me know if it doesn't. No HTML tags will pass through - entering links seems to be the main cause of comment SPAM. Also, please be sure that Javascript is enabled in your browser before attempting to post a writeback. Sorry for any inconvenience, but this really helps cut down on the amount of comment SPAM I have to deal with.
 
 Name:
 URL:(optional)
 Title: (optional)
 Comments:  
Save my Name and URL/Email for next time