Companies like Eli Lilly, Merck, GSK, Bristol-Meyers Squibb cause and perpetuate massive amounts of human suffering. I view them on the same level as Raytheon and Lockheed Martin. Input?

  • Rx_Hawk [he/him]
    hexagon
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    edit-2
    2 months ago

    The thing is their evil is more insidious. Sure they aren't blowing people up, but the affect of withholding medical care without monetary compensation has such a widespread impact its unfathomable.

    I'd honestly bet the pharmaceutical industry (includes the insurance companies) are responsible for more deaths than the MIC, easily.

    https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(18)31668-4/fulltext

    Universal health coverage has been proposed as a strategy to improve health in low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs). However, this is contingent on the provision of good-quality health care. We estimate the excess mortality for conditions targeted in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) that are amenable to health care and the portion of this excess mortality due to poor-quality care in 137 LMICs, in which excess mortality refers to deaths that could have been averted in settings with strong health systems.

    15.6 million excess deaths from 61 conditions occurred in LMICs in 2016. After excluding deaths that could be prevented through public health measures, 8.6 million excess deaths were amenable to health care of which 5.0 million were estimated to be due to receipt of poor-quality care and 3.6 million were due to non-utilisation of health care. Poor quality of health care was a major driver of excess mortality across conditions, from cardiovascular disease and injuries to neonatal and communicable disorders.

    Universal health coverage for SDG conditions could avert 8·6 million deaths per year but only if expansion of service coverage is accompanied by investments into high-quality health systems.

    8.6 million a year

    This is the number of lives that could be saved worldwide if distribution of high-quality medical care (insulin, cancer screenings, blood pressure maintenance, etc) was done fairly and with the preservation of human lives as the primary goal.

    • FunkyStuff [he/him]
      ·
      2 months ago

      8.6 million a year is a ridiculous, tragic number, but think for a second what the cost of American imperial hegemony is. That's a throne of literal billions of skulls once you consider climate change. Is it Caesar's corpse with all of capital's knives each stuck in various directions? Absolutely, pharma emits as much as anyone, but the ones responsible for empire carry the most blame. To that end, I think we can cite Lenin's Imperialism to call out finance capital as also just as ghoulish and even more responsible for climate collapse than the MIC. No single part of capital, not even the Lockheed vampires, carries as much political power as the finance demons. Those are the ones with their finger hammered down on the button that kills us all.

      • Rx_Hawk [he/him]
        hexagon
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        edit-2
        2 months ago

        Yeah I guess what I'm getting at is that us making healthcare for-profit and a commodity is just an extension of the hegemony.

        Quite a disgusting society we have built.