With all of the advances in modern medicine that have taken place over the last few decades
it seems odd that there really hasn't been any kind of progress in curing major diseases
that continue to kill people across the planet at an alarming rate.
If you're looking for an answer as to why that happens, our RT Zone Lee Camp recently
pointed out that comedian Chris Rock explained the rationale against the medical community
during a comedy special in 1999.
During that performance Chris Rock explained that there's no money in curing diseases,
the money actually comes from the medicine that people have to continue coming back to
take more of each and every month.
At the time, you know, this seemed like a humorous explanation but the truth is that
was exactly how major pharmaceutical companies and the banks that underwrite those companies
are operating.
Recently an analyst for Goldman Sachs actually admitted in a paper that curing diseases was
not in the best interest of that financial institution, and instead they needed those
repeat customers coming back for more treatments in order to turn a profit.
Here is the thing, if Wall Streeters are calling the shots about what pharmaceutical companies
are spending their money on, we're never going to make any progress.
The only thing we're going to see are strings of so-called blockbuster medications used
to treat diseases the big pharma itself is actually making up.
They'll rake in billions and the members of society that actually need lifesaving treatments
are going to be left to die.
Joining me now to talk about this issue is Lee Camp, host of Redacted Tonight here on
RT America.
So, Lee, start by telling us exactly how Goldman Sachs feels about curing diseases.
As you pointed this out in a recent article on Truthdig phenomenal, so tell us how they
feel about treating and curing diseases in the United States.
Yeah, not good.
They're not excited about it because it doesn't give enough profit.
I actually want to read the quote from the note that the analyst, the Goldman analyst
put out.
This is Salveen Richter was the analyst and he said, "The potential to deliver one-shot
cures is one of the most attractive aspects of gene therapy.
However, such treatments offer a very different outlook with regard to recurring revenue and
amid versus chronic therapies.
While this proposition carries tremendous value for patients and society it could represent
a challenge for genome medicine developers looking for sustained cash flows."
Sustained cash flows.
As if that should ever even come into your mind when you're talking about saving people?
It's disgusting and it's how Wall street and our economy is set up.
It's just the difference is now they're saying it out loud, they're saying it where people
can see it.
We've seen a lot of that recently with politicians business leaders, lobbyists, they're accidentally
saying the quiets parts loud and the loud parts a little too quiet.
So, I guess the big question is, you know, you've talked about this information, you've
got the quote there, so how did this information come to light?
How did this get uncovered here?
Well, I think you're being a little too generous when you use the word accidentally.
I think nowadays they are saying it more forthright because they have no fear of the government
stopping them, or of even enough people getting upset to shame them.
They have taken such a control, but in terms of how it came forward it's just that it's
an analyst note, they put out these notes on a regular basis trying to guide their clients,
their investors.
Invest in this, don't invest in this, here is how we see this, and as you heard from
the quote I just read, they have no care in the world as to how it's going to impact people.
How it's going to hurt Americans to not have these cures.
I mean, it's disgusting, and later in the note he goes on to say that not only do they
lose the money by someone having a cure for their disease, meaning they're not buying
further medication, but they also lose more money because that person doesn't pass communication
diseases, infectious diseases onto other people.
So, they're lamenting that they have partnership with hepatitis C basically, Farron.
They're in partnership for profit with infectious diseases.
It's disgusting.
I think Goldman Sachs is about a week a way from just having some of their people going
out and stabbing people with infected needles just to get a little more profit out of this.
That's absolutely, I mean, insane at this point, but not only ... Okay, they want people
to stay sick, they want you to go out and infect everybody that you can, why does Goldman
Sachs even care what happens with healthcare?
How are they involved in this and why?
Why do we need banks involved in healthcare?
Yeah, absolutely.
Everything has become so intertwined because the big banks, the large corporations that
now we're down to a tiny number of corporation that own or control most of everything in
our lives and they're all intertwined and they're all just moving towards profit, right?
No matter what it is, no matter how many people die, no matter how much you're putting profit
above lives that's where they're going to head.
And there's a ton of profit in our healthcare industry.
That's why all of our politicians, most of our congress fight against a universal healthcare
system where people aren't exploited for profit.
But you also see it with like our weapons contractors, same idea.
When peace was announced between North and South Korea the stocks of those contractors
tanked.
I mean, why is profit even talked about when it comes to people's lives?
But of course that's the system we live.
This unfettered capitalist system in which people do discuss profit while it's killing
people.
Whether it's through medicines or weapons or whatever else.
Well, you know what they say when God closes a door he opens a window, and that's what's
happened with the defense contractors.
They may not have North Korea anymore but now they're gearing up for Iran, but it's
a topic for a different day, but anyway.
So, this story, we got Goldman Sachs wanting people sick, wanting you to infect everybody
else because it makes them more money, so does this help to kind of give us a little
bit better understanding as to why Americans uniquely pay such astronomical markups for
our prescription drugs?
I mean, we're paying prices higher than anywhere else in the industrialized world.
We know it's not R&D, we know it has something to do with marketing, but now we know the
banks are involved so that kind of puts another piece of the puzzle back into place, right?
Yeah, and there's a lot of these companies that spend 3% or 5% on R&D, research and development
meaning they're not actually spending the money to create these medicines, they're just
buying up medicines or ... The EpiPen was a good example, buying up things that people
need desperately and then jerking up the price 1000%, 5000%, and that's their entire profit
model.
That's their entire business model, is just jerking up the price on live saving medications,
and various things people desperately need.
That's the whole business model, and as you're saying in terms of why these prices are so
high, they're even higher on things that are an outright cure.
So, if you're going to outright cure someone, man we're going to jerk up the price on that
because we're not going to get the steady income from an ongoing medication.
A good example was this past January a new treatment, gene therapy treatment came out
to solve blindness, a certain kind of blindness.
It cures it for the people that have that specific kind of blindness, and it's one of
the most expensive therapies ever created, ever introduced at $850,000.
So, they're basically holding your vision hostage till you give them $1 million.
In my view that is no different than yeah we'll let you see, we will give you the most
amazing gift to have sight again, yet we will charge you $1 million.
We will hold it hostage for $1 million.
And that's a sick system.
That is a demented morally inverted system.
And that's what we have thought today.
It is a morally inverted system.
You touched on this a few moments ago, but one of the biggest takeaways from the story
is not just how evil and corrupt these Goldman Sachs and big pharma guys are, but it's that
these corporations that run our lives, you've got healthcare big pharma, big banks they're
all interconnected.
I mean, are we just at that point like as a capitalist society in the United States
where there's no escaping this corporate control?
They're involved in everything and they're all in it together.
It's this big cabal they run everything together.
Have we passed the point of no return?
I mean, I don't want to say it's hopeless but it's certainly grim.
I think people need to reexamine and have a revolution of the mind, change the way we
view our society.
These systems should not be set up to seek profit over all else.
We have to realize that we are owned something by being part of our society.
We have agreed to be an active member, a working member of our society, we give to it, we help
it exist, therefore we deserve things back from it.
We deserve healthcare.
We deserve unemployment.
We deserve paid sick leave, and there's so many other things, education.
There's so many other things we deserve from our society as being part of it and helping
it exist as a successful society.
And that idea, that mentality, that mindset has been crushed so that these corporations
can take over everything, and it is a ...
Political philosopher Sheldon Wolin called it 'inverted totalitarianism".
It's ruled by the anonymous corporate state, they've taken over the government and now
they have no fear of saying these things outright, saying these things in public because they
know they aren't going to be restricted.
They know they aren't going to be punished.
They know they can do it with abandon and there's just nothing that can stop them unless
we the people truly change the way we view these systems.
So, on this particular issue of healthcare, is a single-payer Medicare for all, is that
the only way to beat back the banks and big pharma and the healthcare system?
One of those systems, like everybody else in the industrialized world has, is that the
solution here?
Yeah.
Call me crazy but I think it's time we join the developed world and have healthcare for
our people.
It's ridiculous that we still haven't done it.
It's gross a sick profit system, and Obamacare helped to give healthcare to some people,
but it was a stopgap.
It was a band aid so people stop seeing how horrible the system is, but you still have
tens of millions of people without any healthcare, and then you have people with healthcare who
are still getting exploited and destroyed.
The number one cause of bankruptcy is health problems, because you get saddled with all
this crazy debt and it destroys lives.
Even if you don't end up dying from disease or something, you are saddled with a debt
that then defines the rest of your life.
It's a preposterous like laughingly gross system, and this discussion that you and I
are having is largely not even heard on our corporate media airwaves.
As if we shouldn't be able to talk about this the way it is, which is demented and perverted
to benefit and profit in the billion off of people's health.
Absolutely. Lee Camp, thank you very much for joining me today.
I always appreciate talking with you.
Thank you Farron.