Drug Shortages – Here Now

This mornings NY Times had a headline article U.S. Scrambling to Ease Shortage of Vital Medicine which came a bit out of the blue for this writer.

Federal officials and lawmakers, along with the drug industry and doctors’ groups, are rushing to find remedies for critical shortages of drugs to treat a number of life-threatening illnesses, including bacterial infection and several forms of cancer.

The facts in the article are quite frightening and could have immediate consequences for any of us. The suppositions of the reasons for these shortages are also alarming as they fall right in line with the Times’ usual suspects. A scan of 100+ comments on the Times article reveals loyal readers screaming for the heads of free enterprise. Times readers howl about the scourge of high prices while missing the point that this article’s discussion is about shortages, rather than about prices.  This is a knee jerk reaction to a misunderstood systemic problem.

The FDA posts these reasons on their website. There is likely at least some truth to their allegations about quality of imports. Many writers see the FDA as a major part of the solution to this problem.

Perversely, the only shortage that previously surfaced in the NY  Times was that of the drugs used for lethal injections.

With but a bit of poking around I found this op-ed by Ezekiel J. Emanuel who is an oncologist and former White House adviser, excerpt below.

The underlying reason for this is that cancer patients do not buy chemotherapy drugs from their local pharmacies the way they buy asthma inhalers or insulin. Instead, it is their oncologists who buy the drugs, administer them and then bill Medicare and insurance companies for the costs.

Historically, this “buy and bill” system was quite lucrative; drug companies charged Medicare and insurance companies inflated, essentially made-up “average wholesale prices.” The Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement and Modernization Act of 2003, signed by President George W. Bush, put an end to this arrangement. It required Medicare to pay the physicians who prescribed the drugs based on a drug’s actual average selling price, plus 6 percent for handling. And indirectly — because of the time it takes drug companies to compile actual sales data and the government to revise the average selling price — it restricted the price from increasing by more than 6 percent every six months.

The act had an unintended consequence. In the first two or three years after a cancer drug goes generic, its price can drop by as much as 90 percent as manufacturers compete for market share. But if a shortage develops, the drug’s price should be able to increase again to attract more manufacturers. Because the 2003 act effectively limits drug price increases, it prevents this from happening. The low profit margins mean that manufacturers face a hard choice: lose money producing a lifesaving drug or switch limited production capacity to a more lucrative drug.

I think Emanuel is holding the smoking gun, the problem is regulation and consequences  - what do you think?

Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory

 I don’t often make posts based on Ann Coulter’s articles, but I must be on her wavelength lately. While the liberal democrats are doing horrendous things, I think the Republican mainstream is gearing up to completely mis-read the situation and miss any real opportunity to make a difference.

Energy from Trash – Where Do We Stand?

Three years ago Popular Science ran an article entitled The Prophet of Garbage which described relatively small-scale plants that use super-hot plasma incineration to turn garbage into energy. I thought at the time that this was a possible solution to both energy and waste disposal problems that was worth looking at.  Now three years later, let’s ask ourselves how many times we have heard waste-to-energy (WTE) mentioned as compared with solar energy. Oh, WTE, you have never heard of it? That’s what I suspected!

Today, WTE is front page news by the NY Times (this article condensed below.) This article makes a good case for WTE, but it suggests that while WTE is alive and well in Europe (Denmark in particular), it has little significance in the US. This table shows WTE facilities in my home state of Florida as of 1998. According to Wikipedia, there are 89 such plants operating in the US. Many of these plants produce energy at the scale of real powerplants (100 to 500 megawatts), not like 10 MW solar toys. The Times seems to have missed this tidbit.

The Times does not speculate too deeply on why we do not hear more in the US although New York issues are discussed. It’s true that WTE converts most input to pure CO2, a current anethema, but what is the alternative? Landfills produce methane which is many times worse a green house gas. In today’ s tight credit market, drumming up the hundreds of millions of required capital is difficult, but our government is throwing billions at much less worthwhile projects.

The green police scream recycle, as if that process has no energy and carbon footprint. The greens are a one-trick pony and brook no re-consideration of their tenets.

I have another thought. WTE is practical right now at scales from a villiage sized facility all the way up to full municipal power plant capacity.  Perphaps the potential for local installation and independent or even private operation offends the central planning types? Call me paranoid, but we have missed the WTE boat so far.

Europe Finds Clean Energy in Trash, but U.S. Lags

By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

HORSHOLM, Denmark — The lawyers and engineers who dwell in an elegant enclave here are at peace with the hulking neighbor just over the back fence: a vast energy plant that burns thousands of tons of household garbage and industrial waste, round the clock.

Far cleaner than conventional incinerators, this new type of plant converts local trash into heat and electricity. Dozens of filters catch pollutants, from mercury to dioxin, that would have emerged from its smokestack only a decade ago.

In that time, such plants have become both the mainstay of garbage disposal and a crucial fuel source across Denmark, from wealthy exurbs like Horsholm to Copenhagen’s downtown area. Their use has not only reduced the country’s energy costs and reliance on oil and gas, but also benefited the environment, diminishing the use of landfills and cutting carbon dioxide emissions. The plants run so cleanly that many times more dioxin is now released from home fireplaces and backyard barbecues than from incineration.

With all these innovations, Denmark now regards garbage as a clean alternative fuel rather than a smelly, unsightly problem. And the incinerators, known as waste-to-energy plants, have acquired considerable cachet as communities like Horsholm vie to have them built.

Denmark now has 29 such plants, serving 98 municipalities in a country of 5.5 million people, and 10 more are planned or under construction. Across Europe, there are about 400 plants, with Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands leading the pack in expanding them and building new ones.

By contrast, no new waste-to-energy plants are being planned or built in the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency says — even though the federal government and 24 states now classify waste that is burned this way for energy as a renewable fuel, in many cases eligible for subsidies. There are only 87 trash-burning power plants in the United States, a country of more than 300 million people, and almost all were built at least 15 years ago.

Instead, distant landfills remain the end point for most of the nation’s trash. New York City alone sends 10,500 tons of residential waste each day to landfills in places like Ohio and South Carolina.

“Europe has gotten out ahead with this newest technology,” said Ian A. Bowles, a former Clinton administration official who is now the Massachusetts state secretary of energy.

Still, Mr. Bowles said that as America’s current landfills topped out and pressure to reduce heat-trapping gases grew, Massachusetts and some other states were “actively considering” new waste-to-energy proposals; several existing plants are being expanded. He said he expected resistance all the same in a place where even a wind turbine sets off protests.

Why Americans Are Reluctant

Matt Hale, director of the Office of Resource Conservation and Recovery of the United States Environmental Protection Agency, said the reasons that waste-to-energy plants had not caught on nationally were the relative abundance of cheap landfills in a large country, opposition from state officials who feared the plants could undercut recycling programs and a “negative public perception.” In the United States, individual states and municipalities generally decide what method to use to get rid of their waste.

Still, a 2009 study by the E.P.A. and North Carolina State University scientists came down strongly in favor of waste-to-energy plants over landfills as the most environmentally friendly destination for urban waste that cannot be recycled. Embracing the technology would not only reduce greenhouse gas emissions and local pollution, but also yield copious electricity, it said.

Yet powerful environmental groups have fought the concept passionately. “Incinerators are really the devil,” said Laura Haight, a senior environmental associate with the New York Public Interest Research Group.

Investing in garbage as a green resource is simply perverse when governments should be mandating recycling, she said. “Once you build a waste-to-energy plant, you then have to feed it. Our priority is pushing for zero waste.”

The group has vigorously opposed building a plant in New York City.

Even Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who has championed green initiatives and ranked Copenhagen’s waste-fueled heating on his list of environmental “best practices,” has shied away from proposing to get one built.

“It is not currently being pursued — not because of the technology, which has advanced, but because of the issue in selecting sites to build incinerators,” said Jason Post, the mayor’s deputy press secretary on environmental issues. “It’s a Nimby issue. It would take years of hearings and reviews.”

Nickolas J. Themelis, a professor of engineering at Columbia University and a waste-to-energy proponent, said America’s resistance to constructing the new plants was economically and environmentally “irresponsible.”

“It’s so irrational; I’ve almost given up with New York,” he said. “It’s like you’re in a village of Hottentots who look up and see an airplane — when everybody else is using airplanes — and they say, ‘No, we won’t do it, it’s too scary.’ ”

Acceptance in Denmark

Attitudes could hardly be more different in Denmark, where plants are placed in the communities they serve, no matter how affluent, so that the heat of burning garbage can be efficiently piped into homes.

Planners take pains to separate residential traffic from trucks delivering garbage, and some of the newest plants are encased in elaborate outer shells that resemble sculptures.

“New buyers are usually O.K. with the plant,” said Hans Rast, president of the homeowners’ association in Horsholm, who cut a distinguished figure in corduroy slacks and a V-neck sweater as he poured coffee in a living room of white couches and Oriental rugs.

“What they like is that they look out and see the forest,” he said. (The living rooms in this enclave of town houses face fields and trees, while the plant is roughly some 400 yards over a back fence that borders the homes’ carports). The lower heating costs don’t hurt, either. Eighty percent of Horsholm’s heat and 20 percent of its electricity come from burning trash.

Many countries that are expanding waste-to-energy capacity, like Denmark and Germany, typically also have the highest recycling rates; only the material that cannot be recycled is burned.

Waste-to-energy plants do involve large upfront expenditures, and tight credit can be a big deterrent. Harrisburg, Pa., has been flirting with bankruptcy because of a $300 million loan it took to reopen and refit an old public incinerator with the new technology.

But hauling trash is expensive, too. New York City paid $307 million last year to export more than four million tons of waste, mostly to landfills in distant states, Mr. Post said. Although the city is trying to move more of its trash by train or barge, much of it travels by truck, with heavy fuel emissions.

In 2009, a small portion of the city’s trash was processed at two 1990-vintage waste-to-energy plants in Newark and Hempstead, N.Y., owned by a private company, Covanta. The city pays $65 a ton for the service — the cheapest available way for New York City to get rid of its trash. Sending garbage to landfills is more expensive: the city’s costliest current method is to haul waste by rail to a landfill in Virginia.

While new, state-of-the-art landfills do collect the methane that emanates from rotting garbage to make electricity, they churn out roughly twice as much climate-warming gas as waste-to-energy plants do for the units of power they produce, the 2009 E.P.A. study found. Methane, the primary warming gas emitted by landfills, is about 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide, the gas released by burning garbage.

The study also concluded that waste-to-energy plants produced lower levels of pollutants than the best landfills did, but nine times the energy. Although new landfills are lined to prevent leaks of toxic substances and often capture methane, the process is highly inefficient, it noted.

Laws Spur New Technology

In Europe, environmental laws have hastened the development of waste-to-energy programs. The European Union severely restricts the creation of new landfill sites, and its nations already have binding commitments to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions by 2012 under the international pact known as the Kyoto Protocol, which was never ratified by the United States.

Garbage cannot easily be placed out of sight, out of mind in Europe’s smaller, densely populated countries, as it so often is in the United States. Many of the 87 waste-to-energy plants in the United States are in densely populated areas like Long Island and Cape Cod.

While these plants are generally two decades old, many have been progressively retrofitted with new pollution filters, though few produce both heat and power like the newest Danish versions.

In Horsholm only 4 percent of waste now goes to landfills, and 1 percent (chemicals, paints and some electronic equipment) is consigned to “special disposal” in places like secure storage vaults in an abandoned salt mine in Germany. Sixty-one percent of the town’s waste is recycled and 34 percent is incinerated at waste-to-energy plants.

From a pollution perspective, today’s energy-generating incinerators have little in common with the smoke-belching models of the past. They have arrays of newly developed filters and scrubbers to capture the offending chemicals. Emissions from the plants in all categories have been reduced to just 10 to 20 percent of levels allowed by the EU.

At the end of the incineration process, the extracted acids, heavy metals and gypsum are sold for use in manufacturing or construction.

“The hazardous elements are concentrated and handled with care rather than dispersed as they would be in a landfill,” said Ivar Green-Paulsen, general manager of the Vestforbraending plant in Copenhagen, the country’s largest.

In Denmark, local governments run trash collection as well as the incinerators and recycling centers, and laws and financial incentives ensure that recyclable materials are not burned. (In the United States most waste-to-energy plants are private ventures.) Communities may drop recyclable waste at recycling centers free of charge, but must pay to have garbage incinerated.

The homeowners’ association in Horsholm has raised what its president, Mr. Rast, called “minor issues” with the plant, like a bright light on the chimney that shone into some bedrooms, and occasional truck noise. But mostly, he said, it is a respected silent neighbor, producing no noticeable odors.

The plant, owned by five adjacent communities, has even proved popular in a conservative region with Denmark’s highest per-capita income. Morten Slotved, 40, Horsholm’s mayor, is trying to expand it. “Constituents like it because it decreases heating costs and raises home values,” he said with a smile. “I’d like another furnace.”

Obama vs. the 10th Amendment

The issue of how the current crop of government over-reaching interacts with the US Consititution seems very important. Below is an article by Chuck Norris that deals directly with this issue.

Obama vs. the 10th Amendment Chuck Norris Tuesday, March 02, 2010

Not surprisingly, a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey released last Friday revealed that 56 percent of Americans think the federal government has become so large and powerful that it poses an immediate threat to their rights and freedoms.

Particularly apropos here is the feds’ health care violation of the 10th Amendment, which is part of our Bill of Rights and was ratified Dec. 15, 1791. The amendment says, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Thomas Jefferson explained the pre-eminence of this amendment in 1791: “I consider the foundation of the Constitution as laid on this ground: That ‘all powers not delegated to the United States, by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States or to the people.’ To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specially drawn around the powers of Congress, is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible of any definition.”

The point is that based on the 10th Amendment, when it comes to legislating and controlling our health care, the federal government doesn’t have a constitutional leg to stand on. And even its past violations of the 10th Amendment by implementing government health care services have proved to break more national legs than they have to mend them. The proof is in the pudding. How many times does it have to be pointed out to Washington? Medicare is going bankrupt. Medicaid is going bankrupt. Case closed.

The government is inept to run America’s health care system. And now it wants to expand its programs (its health care business) to oversee what equates to one-sixth of the gross national product? What rational board anywhere in the world would rightly appoint a CEO who had a string of miserable business failures and major corporate bankruptcies in his dossier?

I agree with Dr. Scott W. Atlas, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a professor at Stanford University Medical Center, and South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, who put it best in their article a few months back, titled “Alternatives to government health takeover.” They said this: “We think it’s critical that power shifts to the American consumer and away from government, employers and insurers, as evidence shows medical care prices come down when patients pay directly. Government should offer tax relief, such as refundable tax credits, to encourage private health insurance purchasing — especially for low-income families. Similar ideas, like those in the Patients’ Choice Act … are important for Americans to consider. We would do well also to consider creative ideas such as changing federal payments to state-based medicaid plans to individual vouchers or expanding health savings accounts, as has been done in South Carolina.”

Returning the onus of solving health care issues to families, local communities and states would not only return a balance of power to our federal government but also help with America’s economic recovery and build up communities at the same time.

The abuse of federal political power to intervene in areas such as Americans’ private health care could exist only in a nation that no longer holds its leaders accountable to its constitution and that has governmental leadership that regards itself as above its people and its constitution. Sadly, I was listening to an interview the other day in which President Barack Obama described the U.S. Constitution as “an imperfect document … a document that reflects some deep flaws … (and) an enormous blind spot.” He also said, “The Framers had that same blind spot.”

In so doing, the president established a rationale and justification for disregarding the Constitution. Even worse, he placed himself above the Constitution and those “blind Framers,” who just couldn’t see the big picture as he does today. After all, he’s the constitutional scholar, and the Framers were just, well, the creators of the document!

Our 44th president would do well to learn from America’s third president, Thomas Jefferson, himself a source greater than any living constitutional lawyer. Imagine Jefferson sitting there at the health care summit, a ripe sage at roughly 80 years of age. After listening to all the clamoring of both Republicans and Democrats, he politely but sternly utters these words, which he also wrote to Supreme Court Justice William Johnson in 1823: “The States supposed that by their tenth amendment, they had secured themselves against constructive powers. They (did not learn from the past), nor (were they) aware of the slipperiness of the eels of the law. I ask for no straining of words against the General Government, nor yet against the States. I believe the States can best govern our home concerns, and the General Government our foreign ones. I wish, therefore, to see maintained that wholesome distribution of powers established by the constitution for the limitation of both; and never to see all offices transferred to Washington, where, further withdrawn from the eyes of the people, they may more secretly be bought and sold as at market.”

It couldn’t be any clearer or wiser than that.

I encourage you to go to TenthAmendmentCenter.com and learn more about your 10th Amendment rights, and then fight for those rights by holding all your representatives accountable to them.

Copyright © 2010 Salem Web Network. All Rights Reserved.

Green Jobs Wack-A-Mole

Unbelievably, Van Jones is back! Here is an article by Star Parker, Monday, March 01, 2010.  Star, who pulls no punches, is a favorite of mine.

We Need Green Money, Not Green Jobs

Van Jones is back, reconstructed and rehabilitated.

Jones, recall, departed from his White House job as “green jobs czar” after publicity about his association with a “9/11 truther” organization that alleges complicity of the Bush administration with the 9/11 attack.

He was already a lightening rod, having characterized President Bush as a “crackhead”, using profanity to describe Republicans, and offering gems like blaming “white polluters and white environmentalists” for “steering poison” to minority communities.

But as White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel understands that power brokers should “never waste a crisis”, those on the left grasp that you never waste an asset like a black self-described communist from the 1990′s with an Ivy League degree and a best-selling “green jobs” book.

So now Jones has new jobs at Princeton University and Washington’s Center for American Progress. And, to seal the public rehabilitation, he will be awarded the NAACP’s Image Award, and has been called by NAACP president Benjamin Jealous a “national treasure.”

Central to Jones’ work will, of course, be the continuation of his “green jobs” agenda. The Center for American Progress announcement says he’ll be a senior fellow and leader with its Green Opportunity Initiative.

CAP was founded by rich liberals who thought the left needed a think tank like conservatives have (as they concluded they needed talk radio, and hence founded the now defunct Air America). One of the major sources of funding of CAP was Marion and Herbert Sandler who got rich building Golden West Financial selling Adjustable Rate Mortgages with teaser rates to unsophisticated buyers. Yes, the very greedy kind of businesspeople that the Obama administration would have us believe caused our current economic crisis.

But the beauty of the left is that facts will never get in the way of ideology.

The recent scandal associated with the use of research data at the Climate Research Unit in England — which has been essentially the headquarters of global warming research — has brought claims of man-made climate change into serious doubt.

Sober minds realize that this must be a time for reassessment about assumptions driving the belief that irreversible climate change has occurred and that this alleged change is caused by human activity. As expressed in an editorial in Britain’s Prospect Magazine, “We cannot rely on highly imperfect climate models as a basis for policy initiatives that cost billions and change how we live.”

But this hasn’t put a dent in the green jobs movement. President Obama continues to push this idea as central to economic recovery, as he did the other day speaking to CEOs at the Business Roundtable in Washington.

The love affair on the left with “green jobs” is, of course, about ideology, which is why facts are irrelevant. It is another excuse to grow government and bring European socialism to America. What could be a better opportunity than to claim that the planet’s atmosphere is now out of whack because of capitalism?

Van Jones is important because he uses environmentalism as a new platform to welcome poor blacks onto the government plantation.

This is important spin because poor folks do have common sense. In a Zogby poll done after the presidential election, 73 percent of blacks said they were opposed to taxing fossil fuels to promote alternative energy.

The Carter Administration invested $2.1 billion in the Great Plains Coal Gasification Plant to convert coal to gas. The result? Zero. Federal government spending since 1961 on “advanced energy technologies and basic energy science research” totals $187 billion with hardly anything to show.

Poor folks don’t need socialism or green jobs. They need green money. They’ll get more of it being free, going to school, getting married and going to work.