Earthly Delights

How to have a good evening:

Eat some good Japanese noodle soup with tofu and red pepper flakes.

Go to the coffee place and have a good Italian style macchiato and a small cigar.

Obtain three pretty women and a smart nice kid and go with them to a deli, where you share their pleasant company and eat half a sandwich and a piece of PIE.

Go home and have a glass of sake and stare into space with a warm soft cat on you.

Thanks to miss_geek, daisyhunter, and sooz for a lovely friday Evening.

Dept of Pure Evil: Genentech says “no substitutions”

Genentech makes an eye drug called Lucentis. It’s expensive: $2000/month. They also make a cancer drug called Avastin. It’s inexpensive: $40/month.

The two drugs are chemically very similar. So similar, in fact, that compounding pharmacies are repackaging Avastin and doctors are prescribing it for the eye problem.

Genentech doesn’t like this. They want the money for Lucentis. So, they’re stopping shipment of Avastin to all the pharmacies and sending it only to hospital pharmacies or directly to doctors. Furthermore, they’re refusing participate in the NIH study to confirm or reject the similar usefulness of the two drugs, and not even providing drugs at cost to the study as is customary.

Result? $1-$3 billion more a year of taxpayer money into Medicare, because almost all the patients involved are over 65. I think it’s great how the drug companies selflessly do research and development to keep us all healt… yeah.

Wall St. Journal article below.

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