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Oregon Sues Oracle For "Abysmal" Healthcare Website
SpzToid (869795) writes The state of Oregon sued Oracle America Inc. and six of its top executives Friday, accusing the software giant of fraud for failing to deliver a working website for the Affordable Care Act program. The 126-page lawsuit claims Oracle has committed fraud, lies, and "a pattern of activity that has cost the State and Cover Oregon hundreds of millions of dollars". "Not only were Oracle's claims lies, Oracle's work was abysmal", the lawsuit said. Oregon paid Oracle about $240.3 million for a system that never worked, the suit said. "Today's lawsuit clearly explains how egregiously Oracle has disserved Oregonians and our state agencies", said Oregon Atty. Gen. Ellen Rosenblum in a written statement. "Over the course of our investigation, it became abundantly clear that Oracle repeatedly lied and defrauded the state. Through this legal action, we intend to make our state whole and make sure taxpayers aren't left holding the bag."
Oregon's suit alleges that Oracle, the largest tech contractor working on the website, falsely convinced officials to buy "hundreds of millions of dollars of Oracle products and services that failed to perform as promised." It is seeking $200 million in damages. Oracle issued a statement saying the suit "is a desperate attempt to deflect blame from Cover Oregon and the governor for their failures to manage a complex IT project. The complaint is a fictional account of the Oregon Healthcare Project."
Oregon's suit alleges that Oracle, the largest tech contractor working on the website, falsely convinced officials to buy "hundreds of millions of dollars of Oracle products and services that failed to perform as promised." It is seeking $200 million in damages. Oracle issued a statement saying the suit "is a desperate attempt to deflect blame from Cover Oregon and the governor for their failures to manage a complex IT project. The complaint is a fictional account of the Oregon Healthcare Project."
HAHA!
I hope they get it good... bastards.
I don't know if Oregon's suit has merit or not, but that sure sounds like my employer's experience with Oracle.
"What procedure was used to select Oracle on the market of solution vendors?"
"Well, their name kind of starts like our name, so we thought they'd be the best for us. We've also heard there's a lot of trees in their software. We like trees."
Ezekiel 23:20
I have no doubt at all that Oracle committed fraud and lied a lot. I have no doubt Oregon's project management failed to give adequate oversight to the project, failed to adequately specify the project, and repeatedly changed what little specification they provided.
Neither matters. I have no doubt this lawsuit will ultimately fail, because the Oregon attorney general doesn't have the technical ability to prove the fraud and lies. The state has already proven they don't understand what they're doing. We're about to get a second demonstration.
Larry Ellison just bought Oregon.
I'm pretty sure for 240 million I'd be able to do it from my bedroom.
"is a desperate attempt to deflect blame from Cover Oregon and the governor for their failures to manage a complex IT project." It shouldn't be their job, that's what they paid you for.
For those who seek perfection there can be no rest on this side of the grave.
Yes, that would most likely be under vexatious litigation.
It is a tough standard to meet, but it can be done.
You can also void a contract under various practices to dispute them as unjust.
For me as a total but interrested outsider it looks like the closet republican Larry is took his chance to frustrate decent healthcare.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
I'm starting to think that State, Provincial, Reigonal, Local and Federal governments should Purchase Technologies from companies, and then hire their own Salaried Engineers to actually handle the operations. Stop creating these service contracts and don't let this nonsense go on.
I have no love for Oracle, but the blame cannot be placed at their feet. As has been reported in local Oregon and nationwide news, Oracle insisted Oregon hire a project manager and systems integrator, either because the contract did not permit Oracle to fulfill those roles or Oracle was not capable of performing those roles. Oregon refused those requests, despite many warnings from Oracle and Cover Oregon's own director that without such services the site would not be ready to go live. Instead, Oregon placed a gag order on everyone involved in the project to hide the problems from the public. This is very much a problem caused by Oregon, not by any willful fraud by Oracle. This is also SOP for Oregon Government, with just about any project they undertake. (Full disclosure, I am one of many pissed off Oregonians.)
Here's a success story about Kentucky's Kynect Exchange.
They need not have worried. Over the past year, Kentucky’s health care website has proved to be a huge success. More than a half-million Kentucky residents have signed up for the Bluegrass State’s version of Obamacare. A majority of Kentuckians approve of it. That this has happened in a deeply red state is unexpected but hardly an accident.
Good answer: "... the Oregon attorney general doesn't have the technical ability to prove the fraud and lies. The state has already proven they don't understand what they're doing."
Also, Oracle has been through this perhaps thousands of times. Apparently the major profit center for companies like Oracle is being late and more expensive than predicted. For example, see this quote from the book, Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment:
"... a recent General Accounting Office report on U.S. military equipment procurement concluded that only 1% of major military purchases involving high technology were delivered on time and on budget."
That book says the problem is due to a sociological mistake. My understanding is that it is entirely intended, a way of making money from the largely hidden military purchases of the U.S. government. For the U.S. government, killing people is an enormous, extremely profitable business.
My onetime employer had Oracle come in and take over managing their entire employee database system.
At one point a manager asked what it would take to have the letter that the system created to be sent out accepting a new employee changed to add a yellow hilight over a couple of important lines in the Word document.
They told him it would take six hours of programmer time at $200/hour.
He bought a 69 cent hilighter instead.
240 million dollars? For a website? This is amazingly stupid. That is a ridiculous amount of money for the functionality they're looking for.
"from Cover Oregon and the governor for their failures to manage a complex IT project."
Err, excuse me - if Oracle are the contractor its up to THEM to manage the fecking project. Why the hell should the governor be hands on with this? Do they think he's also down at every roadworks checking the spades?
Usually when you hire a big company like Oracle you give them the requirements, pay them money and they're supposed to deliver the goods, so Oracle whining that they apparently weren't given good enough management is pathetic.
I wonder what are the odds they used some cheap indian labour who can just about switch on a computer much less deliver a working program. Sorry if some people find that racist, but indian coders in my experience are universally bloody useless.
How is building a website with a database back end a complex project? How does 240 million get spent and they couldn't afford a project manager? I know there are ridiculous integration requirement but this isn't exactly rocket surgery.
I dare Oracle to audit just exactly who worked on this project - how many H1-B's at Oracle and foreign outsourcing.insourcing was done (probably, to India). I will bet hard $$$ that a majority of the work for Oregon was done this way. What I have seen over and over again is more and more H1-B garbage code put into BASIC infrastructure projects. Oracle and other companies walk away with profit, and we're left holding a bag of garbage.
I'm not a PhD level database guru, but my career has been almost entirely working with databases over the last 20 years. I can say that the underlying technology of the Oracle RDBMS itself is light years beyond other systems. I'm not an advocate of anything Oracle has done in other arenas over the last 10-15 years, but I experience an existential crisis every day in my job where I love working within an Oracle database, but hate pretty much everything about the company that owns it.
A big part of the blame should go to Oregon for trying to start with a big, complex site. Of all the states that implement Obamacare Insurance Exchanges, Oregon's is widely considered the worst, after spending $240M. Kentucky's is widely considered the best. It was ready on day one, and has run without major problems since. Kentucky spent about $8M, or 3% of what Oregon spent. Software development works best with a small, lean team of good developers. Before embarking on this project, the Oregon governor should have read The Mythical Man Month.
Place the realm blame where it belongs and leave Oracle alone.
Who? Lotus Notes? Bill Gates? Nixon?
This is classic application of Hanlon's Razor: Never ascribe to malice that which can be best explained by incompetence.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I'm an Oregonian, and there has been very little information about what actually happened other than the corporate/govenment spin weasels point fingers and whining about the other guy.
To be honest, our state can certainly screw up just like all the rest and on various levels. Just google Dynamite Whale for one example.
On the other hand, my experiences with Oracle and what I've heard from other people that had to deal with them, are far less than stellar.
Right now I'm betting some politician made some stupid mistakes that Oracle didn't bother to even attempt to correct because all they could see was $$. Which of course was compounded by Oracle then going on in a slipshod milk the government cash cow way. The end result being this F-N mess.
How to recover from this? Honestly, I don't really know, especially because we haven't been told what the exact problems are with the system. Sure, we've been told lots of the symptoms, but not the actual problems. (The difference between someone saying my car makes this "kchunk-wnnnng noise", vs "my car's timing belt is slipping".)
One suggestion that might be necessary is to throw out the old code, and go talk to someone with a good working version and license that one for a reasonable fee then rebrand and localize it. (Maybe Kentucky's version.) And no, a reasonable fee isn't what they paid for it if it's something they had developed. Maybe there are other states with lousy versions, and they could all license a good working version. It would sure as hell simplify things going forward for all of them.
Apparently the major profit center for companies like Oracle is being late and more expensive than predicted.
This 100 times. I am amazed again and again that big government projects are almost guaranteed to be over budget and late, and I don't mean 10% in either case. After having this 5000 times, which idiots write the contracts that still don't contain massive penalties for those cases? Grab them by the balls when they promise you the heavens and tell them to deliver or shut up.
Nothing short of corruption can explain this, because I refuse to believe that someone can be this stupid and at the same time still remember how breathing works.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Oracle's DB software is not "lightyears" better, it is an incremental improvement over most competitors for most uses.
However, the usability is SO BAD that your typical company cannot correctly configure their systems to take advantage of Oracle's software - resulting in a final product that is no better, or even worse, than if they had used a competitor.
What you get with Big Companies is lots of Lawyers. There is more money to be made doing exactly what the contract says then doing the job correct. If you do exactly what you are asked to do in the worst way possible you get paid once to do this and keep getting paid to support and modify.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Too bad you posted AC, otherwise I could make sure I never hire you. Sorry man, but the last 10 companies I worked for got pretty big things done with Oracle DBs, and were able to host several-terabyte databases doing things that even DB2 would choke on, never mind MySQL or SQL Server, or any other DB I've worked with. I've worked with more companies that have migrated *to* Oracle because they outgrew what they were using, than the other way around. There's always much gnashing of teeth, and angst over going with such a reprehensible company's product...but that's been my experience at least.
A big part of the blame should go to the Democrats in Congress that passed the law requiring the site to begin with.
Oracle should explain that their software accurately depicts the state of the law. It may be an adequate defense.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
"... a recent General Accounting Office report on U.S. military equipment procurement concluded that only 1% of major military purchases involving high technology were delivered on time and on budget."
That book says the problem is due to a sociological mistake. My understanding is that it is entirely intended, a way of making money from the largely hidden military purchases of the U.S. government. For the U.S. government, killing people is an enormous, extremely profitable business.
The book is wrong, it isn't a "sociological mistake." The problems tend to come from changing requirements (from the gov and events), under bidding (by the company), stop and start funding and various directives (from the Congress), legal challenges from the losing competitors, and the nature of the procurement system.
And no, killing people is not "an enormous, extremely profitable business" for the government. It is quite the opposite.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
That is "Really Big-O" notation, to which you can add, "Oh no!"
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
I've got a hunch you typed that statement by hitting these keys:
F1 in Congress that passed the law to begin with.
A big part of the blame should go to the Democrats in Congress that passed the law requiring the site to begin with.
Except that the site was NOT required. Most states did NOT implement their own site, and either default to the federal site or formed a regional partnership.
Place the realm blame where it belongs and leave Oracle alone.
Who? Lotus Notes? Bill Gates? Nixon?
Nixon. I say we blame Nixon. After all, he was the first sitting president to propose national health care (and of all ironies, Ted Kennedy helped spike it.)
hmmmm...suppose you spend $1 Billion to develop a new drug...just about $1 worth of chemicals per pill. How much are you going to sell it for? Care to make back your investment? Overhead for factories to make it? Promotion so that doctors know about it? Health care for your employees? A retirement plan for your employees?
The drug companies are a bunch of greedy suits. However, attempting to simplify the problem using your reasoning doesn't help anyone.
As a consultant I worked on Oregon's Medicaid system, directly with Oregon senior IT management. It was the first government work I'd done after swearing I never would again 20 years previous, for reasons many are familiar with.
It was shocking; those folks were top notch! No drama, no politics, no crap - just smart people who came to work to get things done, and did it well. I actually looked forward to meetings with the Oregon team because they were that sharp.
I can't say how many of those people might be there now, but knowing them they would have managed their successions too. If those folks think Oracle failed, not only did Oracle probably fail hard, but they will have that fail documented, down to every dotted i and crossed t. Those folks should have been working in the valley.
I should have said, "an enormous, extremely profitable business for those who control the government".
I'll "third" it. My wife needed to use Kynect when I retired. At first there were several bumps. Eventually she was put into contact with a "manager" who looked at the system output for her case, said "nope, not your fault, that looks like a system error", and promptly while my wife was on the telephone with her, over-rode the system to correct it. Things have been fine since.
I suspect Kentucky isn't rich or pretentious enough to try to do everything Oregon might. For development work, it's not a bad mindset.
How about colchicine? It cost about $8/month. Then, one company did a million dollar study, generally considered to have contributed nothing to medical knowledge, and so got temporary exclusivity from the FDA and suddenly it costs $450 for the same thing.
The $1 cost BTW was already covering the factory, employees, etc. The rest is gravy and marketing.
Much of the research is taken care of by universities operating under a federal grant. By all rights, that research belongs to the people already.
Based on the immensity of the pharmaceutical companies, they aren't exactly losing money.
Oh sure, share some blame, that's fine. But that doesn't make Oracle suddenly innocent. Fraud is still fraud, even if you cheat someone dumb.
If Oracle doesn't have the authority to compel teams of government employees to finalize their requirements, then they by definition Oracle isn't running the project.
Madoff is a dual citizen? Of what?
Learn to love Alaska
I've stayed away from that side of IT, but I've heard it isn't size, it's performance. *any* database can keep up with a 2 TB database, even a flat-file. The trick is to do so with 10k lookups, and 1k writes per second (or some other number, I'm just pulling some out of thin air). Oracle claims some uptime and resiliency that's impossible with "standard" databases as well.
Learn to love Alaska
A big part of the blame should go to the Democrats in Congress that passed the law requiring the site to begin with.
Except that the site was NOT required. Most states did NOT implement their own site, and either default to the federal site or formed a regional partnership.
So they blew millions on a lousy website instead of forcing their citizen to use the lousy website on which the federal government blew millions. I'm sure the Oregon people are happy to have paid twice for the same garbage.
Meanwhile Oracle's stock is up almost 1/3 this year. At least some people made money with this healthcare thing.
lucm, indeed.
Right. Most people saved money with that ACA healthcare thing.
Here's an idea. They could operate as non profits! There is no reason for any part of healthcare to make billions in profit every year.
Plenty of people can still be paid extremely well without charging absolutely absurd sums of money for drugs.
Healthcare should have never been allowed to become for profit. Its a basic human right. Plenty of people work hard and make little and can't afford care. How does that make sense in 2014 in what's supposed to be the best nation on earth?
Fuck that.
How about colchicine? It cost about $8/month. Then, one company did a million dollar study, generally considered to have contributed nothing to medical knowledge, and so got temporary exclusivity from the FDA and suddenly it costs $450 for the same thing.
I guess you consider dosage and drug interaction information to be overrated? You know that neglecting that sort of thing kills people?
Do you want your medicine based on modern science, or the "wisdom" of the ancient Greeks and various hill people?
FDA approval
Oral colchicine had been used for many years as an unapproved drug with no prescribing information, dosage recommendations, or drug interaction warnings approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).[8] On July 30, 2009 the FDA approved colchicine as a monotherapy for the treatment of three different indications (familial Mediterranean fever, acute gout flares, and for the prophylaxis of gout flares[8]), and gave URL Pharma a three-year marketing exclusivity agreement[9] in exchange for URL Pharma doing 17 new studies and investing $100 million into the product, of which $45 million went to the FDA for the application fee. URL Pharma raised the price from $0.09 per tablet to $4.85, and the FDA removed the older unapproved colchicine from the market in October 2010 both in oral and IV form, but gave pharmacies the opportunity to buy up the older unapproved colchicine.[10] Colchicine in combination with probenecid has been FDA approved prior to 1982.[9
Based on the immensity of the pharmaceutical companies, they aren't exactly losing money.
And some people think thriving businesses can lose money on every sale but make it up "in volume."
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Except that the site was NOT required. Most states did NOT implement their own site, and either default to the federal site or formed a regional partnership.
In order to qualify legally for the subsidies under the law each state had to set up its own exchange. If the state is going to have an exchange then people need to have a way to access it. How are you going to do that without a web site? Snail mail? Telephone? Currier?
Obamacare’s Architect Agreed That Only State Exchanges Could Offer Subsidies
There are many states where people are not legally eligible for subsidies. They have been illegally receiving them, but they shouldn't count on that to last..
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
A big part of the blame should go to the failed market and its greedy occupants that cause $1 worth of chemicals to cost more than many people make in a year.
A big part of the problem discussing this is clueless people that assign no cost or value to the development and maintenance of scientific and industrial facilities to support investigation of new drugs, and the many person-years of scientific research to identify new drugs, develop the means to economically manufacture them, test them to ensure that they are safe and effective, deal with the growing government bureaucracy, get them to market, and deal with the court cases from the outliers and mistakes.
How about this - we have two drug markets that you can sign up for. One drug market is pretty much as things are today, but maybe with a bit less regulation. The other drug market is one in which anyone that can scrape $1 of chemicals into a pouch and get it to drug stores can sell it for whatever they think it is good for. Maybe they could honor that second market name with a name: patent medicine.
Which will you be signing up for?
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
We are currently in our own form of Oracle hell the higher ups bough into to this new oracle "Solution" for a problem we have (being incidentally vague because i know people at my office read Slashdot) Is causing some of us to pull our hair out. Its truly a fix 1 bug create 3 more type problems over and over. If its not feeding garbage data into our other systems its eating it own tail and corrupting data (Thank goodness for good backups).
suppose you spend $1 Billion to develop a new drug...just about $1 worth of chemicals per pill. How much are you going to sell it for?
Perhaps we should have a system for funding drug development in some way other than per-pill prices.
If 10,000 people have a deadly disease that can be cured with one pill, and one of them is Bill Gates and the rest are poor, then you could maximize profits by charging a billion dollars for the pill, and letting the other 9,999 people die. That is clearly a market failure. This is an extreme example, but is similar in principle to how medicine is actually priced.
Considering that doctors have been successfully and safely using colchicine since before there was an FDA, and continued to do so throughout it's existence under the grandfather clause based on well established guidelines, No, I was not and am not particularly interested in the FDA's rubber stamp. Particularly not a rubber stamp that would cost each and every individual prescribed thousands a year.
The studies really didn't do any more than provide that rubber stamp. They revealed nothing that hadn't already been known for decades, they caused no changes in the use or safety of the drug.
They might as well have flushed the money down the toilet.
I'm pretty sure that interactions with drugs created or repurposed in the recent past don't have a history going back millennia.
The drug ritonavir, which is used to treat AIDs, for example, was only approved in 1996 and it apparently has an interaction with colchicine. The shamans aren't going to be a help with learning that.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Can anyone explain why Oregon is suing six executives as well as the company itself? Normally in such commercial litigation it is only the company that is liable, not individual employees, and if Oregon thinks that the executives went beyond the pale, you'd expect criminal charges. Furthermore, the executives presumably don't have enough assets to contribute substantially to the damages sought. So why are the executives defendants?
That is no good reason to claw back a long time generic drug. Instead, the producer of the new combination drug should deal with that.
Then there's the people who won't be able to afford any combination of either drug now and will be forced to do without or make do with crocus tea (Hellllloooooooooo shaman!) rather than a well controlled manufactured drug.
Of course, for those who can afford it, it's physicians, not shaman who give them the drugs and watch for side effects and interactions. In fact, that's how most interactions are discovered.
Or, for more fun, look at gabapentin vs pregabalin. The former is a generic, the latter is not. There is little appreciable difference except for price.
I'm fine with regulation, but it needs to make sense.
That's why there needs to be a reasonable middle ground. It's one thing if that $1 of chemicals costs $5 or $10 inb the capsule. It's quite another if it costs $32,000.
Obama seems to think he can spend money as he sees fit, contrary to law. Congress decides spending & passes the budget, not the President.
Then reality has shown him to be correct. Rules are enforced on the ruled by the rulers. Rulers don't enforce rules on themselves. Rules are for the peasants.
It's costs that much because men with guns prevent competition from others who would provide those chemicals at a lower cost.
When I'm free to purchase medical care from anyone willing to provide it, it will be time to talk about market failure in health care. Until then, the medical mafia is just another shakedown operation enabled by government guns.
Health care is cheap. Government control is expensive.
and so got temporary exclusivity from the FDA
It's the guns of the government that caused the problem. When the government no longer enforces medical monopolies, we'll stop paying monopoly prices.
Healthcare should have never been allowed to become for profit.
You win the Thug of the Day award. Yes, people shouldn't be *allowed* to exchange value for value based on their own preferences. The government should step in and shoot them. Yay! What a Brave New World!
Government and regulations have their place, but the FDA is well off the deep end. They seem to be all about expanding their power base and seem consider their primary purpose to be more of a nuisance than a reason to be. I notice the agency pocketed $45 million in the colchicine case, all of which will come out of the hides of gout sufferers.
And no, killing people is not "an enormous, extremely profitable business" for the government. It is quite the opposite.
Killing people - not so profitable. Threatening to kill them - very profitable. That's where the power is at. Things are the way they are because most people support men with guns making it that way.
The free market won't work either. The FDA came in to being when the free market gave us a children's sulfa elixir filled with anti-freeze.
Note though that it's not just the FDA. Generic drugs, various medical devices and supplies are all vastly over-priced right down to crutches and tongue depressors.
Then there's the use of expensive still patented drugs in cases where equally good generics are just as usable at a tenth the price. That's not caused by an excess of regulation.
Manual overrides are key to most designs, particularly in new systems.
It's not going to all work perfectly. Not gonna happen. Make sure a person can brute force a solution. You can automate more when the requirements are better understood, and have stabilized.
The goal should be a *process* that works, whatever the tech, and that includes *people*.
In that case I have to agree with you. That doesn't make the general argument valid, though. You are arguing that because a known generic with known characteristics is safe, an unknown drug should also be allowed. I've got to disagree.
OTOH, you can point to a multitude of cases where the system of regulations was abused. And in many cases I'll say, yes, that was clearly abuse. But your original statement vastly oversimplifies the case.
FWIW, many drugs have been re-licensed by removing a compbination of some drug with asprin, and replacing it with the same drug combined with acetiminophin. That means the new drug doesn't work as well for me, as I don't get much relief from acetiminophin, but the older formulation is no longer available. I consider THAT abuse of the system, even though they can cite new studies that qualify the new formulation. I'm rather convinced that they made the change purely to maintain the non-generic status of their drug. This, to me, is clearly abuse of the system, even though the new formulation may be as effective for many people.
So I'm not defending the current system, which I consider quite abused. (I also have my doubts about ANY system where the people that approve drugs as safe, or disapprove them as unsafe, will be the people who benefit by selling them.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Larry was heard laughing and saying "Oregon confused selling with delivering.."
Organization? You must be joking..
That's kind of the point - there was no "well controlled manufactured drug" since there was no standard dosage.
Oral colchicine had been used for many years as an unapproved drug with no prescribing information, dosage recommendations, or drug interaction warnings -- FDA approval
.
And it has some dangerous potential side-effects beyond simple drug interaction.
Without dosage and interaction information you're in the supplement world.
Dangerous supplements
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
In the US the public is armed, and the government doesn't threaten to kill the public. Things are the way they are because of laws.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Every law is an implicit threat of violence, backed by guns.
You conveniently clipped that quote, allow me to fill it in:
Oral colchicine had been used for many years as an unapproved drug with no prescribing information, dosage recommendations, or drug interaction warnings approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
All those things existed, the FDA just hadn't whacked them with it's $45million approval stamp.
The rest of the argument sort of falls apart there.
Unlike the supplements, colchicine was regulated for purity and accurate dosing and is prescribed by a physician following long-standing medical guidelines and monitored.
However, I'm going to challenge the article on supplements a bit. I have NEVER seen aconite (aka monks hood) for sale ANYWHERE. It hasn't been used in medicine (folk or otherwise) in the west for nearly a century. That's why, in spite of being a powerful and dangerous poison, you don't read about deaths from it. If you see it listed somewhere, read closely and you'll see it's in homeopathic form (read no actual aconite present).
Colloidial silver can turn you bluish grey if you use way too much for way too long. Try the same overdose with tylenol and you'll be dead in a week.
But my advice for the silver is don't take it internally. Externally unless in the eyes, use iodine.
I have never suffered any ill effects with ephedra, but then I use a sensible dose intermittently for flu-like symptoms, not in mega doses to lose weight or to pretend I don't need sleep. The others are about as likely to cause harm. Note how they didn't compare the 'dirty dozen' to the figures fro the 12 most dangerous FDA approved drugs.
You might guess from that that there IS dosing and interactionb information out there. They might print it on the bottles if the FDA wouldn't scream 'you didn't say mother may I" and shut them down for selling a drug.
The manufacturers of the selenium supplement in your link SHOULD be sanctioned for providing a dose well off from that indicated on the label. Note that it has happened with FDA approved drugs as well.
Did you ever wonder why nobody else makes the old formulation when it goes generic? It;s because the holder of the exclusive on the new formulation pays them not to.
The endless reformulations that offer no actual patient benefit plus the payoffs very well supports my claim that the extreme cost of drugs is greed driven rather than being intrinsic.
Because instead of holding corporations to their promises and showing them who owns the tanks, governments in the west have spent the past 10 years selling themselves to the cheapest bidder, with treaties allowing corporations to sue governments if they dare pass laws that impact profits.
Sometimes I wish we had a king with a big ego, who'd on as much as the proposal of such a treaty arrest all those corporate bigshots and hang them publicly.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Some people don't get jokes.
Or the math behind the jokes.
Oh well.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Let me explain to you as I would do to my 2 year old son.
If we have an argument and you give me an apple, and I give you an apple to settle, who wins?
NOBODY.
DOH!
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
That those lazy expensive in-house government employees. The invisible hand fairy ensures that Oracle and other contractors is the best way to get work done. Right? Right?
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Not really, no. At least not in the US.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Both Gabapentin and Pregabalin are Generics. Different drugs. The brand name for Pregabain is Lyrica. Pregabalin is (S)-3-(aminomethyl)-5-methylhexanoic acid, while Gabapentin is 2-[1-(aminomethyl)cyclohexyl]acetic acid. Been on both, side effects for the Lyrica are hugely different than Gabapentin.
Browsing without an adblocker is like fucking without a condom - Mal-2
It's public record who passed the law. The Democrats own that law, lock, stock, and barrel, for better or worse.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Hmm, Kaiser. Where have I heard that name before? Oh, I remember: in the Nixon tapes when he's discussing HMO's, which in turn created the largest rise in healthcare costs in the entire history of the United States! Well now that there is sure an unbiased source, yesiree Bob!
An Anonymous Coward does an ad hominem attack without bothering to see if his nay saying has any credibility. How useful.
You could have done a simple Google search
Is this the same Oregon political organization that brought us the Sellwood Bridge - - - - one of the biggest engineering fiascoes I have ever witnessed!
Dick
Except in Canada, Pregabalin won't be a generic for several years. Until then it is much more expensive. It has also been the subject of illegal off-label promotion.
They do have differing side effects and it is up to the individual which one will be preferable. Many have no problem either way. The sensible thing would be to start with the inexpensive Gabapentin and go to Pregabalin if necessary, yet the opposite happens.
A few software thoughts
who understood deeply drop dead dates?
Sane people will sign on to a sure to fail project . At least a year before you get together and write each other glowing references and leave. What went wrong?
this project was part of automating the entire DSHS? Client interface and i can point to worse disasters in trying to do that but i do not know of a success.
of course no one was in charge in the sense of knowing and being able to force decisons for the DSHS project and the cover Oregon project.
I can expect the requirements would have involved a lot of unobtainium hard AI anyway. These things always do.
on the positive side
they did not deploy the crap under the original guy. I was rather proud of him for that
I've had bad experiences myself, though it's a field I have little interest personally. There seems to be a market opportunity.
Did you ever wonder why nobody else makes the old formulation when it goes generic? It;s because the holder of the exclusive on the new formulation pays them not to.
That did happen, so congress made the practice illegal. So instead the the Pharma and the generic manufacturer would enter a careful dance of lawsuits concerning infringement, which would end up with the Pharma settling and paying the generic some money. Congress Made that illegal too ... to some extent. Loopholes remain. Basically a Pharma can keep exclusivity for 6-24 months after the patent runs out depending on how they work it. When the first generic competitor finally comes online, there is very little change in price. Neither wants to start a price war. The big price drop happens when the third generic manufacturer joins the party, at which point competition for market share overtakes the lure of high profit margins.
Guess what: until recently you had both. Some batches of that imported generic lipitor you took in the 'aughts quite likely had little of the active ingredient, due to nonexistent QC protocols at the time. A few billion dollars in fines, plants getting banned from exporting to the US, and increased inspections of foreign plants by the FDA is (hopefully) making the situation better.
Oregon paid Oracle about $240.3 million for a system that never worked, the suit said.... seeking $200 million in damages.
I don't know why the hell they went with Oracle.
I'd have taken the job for $201 million dollars.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Many of the really expensive new drugs are actually quite expensive to produce as well. Turns out scaling up production of antibodies is a bitch, so is producing a custom one-off antibody to treat a single patient's cancer.
Then there's the use of expensive still patented drugs in cases where equally good generics are just as usable at a tenth the price. That's not caused by an excess of regulation.
A lot of the time that is happening because a doctor fought an insurance benefits manager for days to keep a patient on the expensive drug because the generics also used for the condition aren't nearly as good for that for that particular patient. "me too" drugs almost always benefit some groups of patients more than the first in class drug does. If they didn't they couldn't get approved.
Who gets the honey crisp and who gets the road?
Actually, approval does not in practice require the new drug to be as good as or better than the original in any way. It has to show the basic safety and be more effective than placebo.
In many cases, the inexpensive generic isn't even tried before jumping to the expensive option unless the patient brings it up or, in some cases, insists.
My objection is not to the me too drugs in and of themselves, it is to the order they are tried in practice.
The insurance companies are right (for once) to push back when the generic isn't even considered first. They are wrong to keep pushing when the doctor has any articulable reason to go with the more expensive drug for that particular patient, especially when the patient was on the generic and had a problem that the me too might solve.
>Oracle issued a statement saying the suit "is a desperate attempt to deflect blame from Cover Oregon and the governor for their failures to manage a complex IT project.
When a client pays you sums of money that reach this proportion, you would think that they have 0 interaction to do, and would have 100% support of any type of situation possible.
I developed softwares from a-z from start to finish including dev, deploy and support, and I can rest assured that a health care system should not cost this much, let alone give the client such limited service as to say they would still need to be interactive in the configuration, maintenance or deployment of the product.
Oracle to me is the worst overpriced and underworking company out there, they beat IBM , Microsoft and any others for the amount of services provided for the amount they charge. Everyone knows (as a running joke) if you want to make money, get certified as Oracle pro, and you can charge limitless amounts of money...even though technically a MSSQL certified pro could easily surpass in knowledge or service what is offered by way of Oracle.
I worked with Oracle recently and found a glitch in their new 12.0 version of a specific dll responsible for communicating in background...and saw a performance hit based on which version of the client connecting to the new 12.0 db. SO an older client 10.0 dll would not get same sql query execution time then a new client 12.0 dll. In the end, it was because they added new way of pooling queries being searched, and the indexing of the queries was taking longer with older dlls.
I would think this one of those corrupted moves that force all companies to upgrade ALL Oracle components (instead of just a backend)..and get even more money.
I really didnt like their product when compared to the ease of use and speed of dev. of MSSQL. All earlier features that Oracle was known for are now also available with MSSQL, so no more reasons to select Oracle at all..... they even just got around now (15 years after MS) of adding proper increment seeds to their tables....
Overall again, dont like the product as it is way overpriced as all are finding out the hard way now...