Greedy Pharmacists Lie Like Troopers

a pharmacy in olden days

Ontario Drugstore Kickbacks May End Soon

Here’s a comment on my first column about big pharmacies cheating and gouging and stealing from Ontario pill customers: (To read it click pharmacies in the list on the left side of this page)

MountainPharmD has left a new comment on your post "Ontario Pharmacies: Pigs swilling at the glut trough":

“Wow...you are an idiot. That idiotic rant goes to show you have zero understanding of anything related to pharmacy. Your confused ramblings make absolutely no sense. You bash Pharmacists in the same breath as big pharm and giant corporate retail pharmacy as if they are one in the same. Pull your head out of your ass you will find the view is much clearer.”

Note to Mountain PharmD: The expression in English is: they are one and the same. Idiot! Sorry. Illiterate Idiot!

Bill Casselman Replies

Dear MountainPharmD:

This idiot has written 12 books on etymology and has been called by Oxford University Press: “Bill Casselman is one of the country’s leading etymologists.” Anyone who thinks I’m an idiot can take a look at my 400-page website on the history of English words and can decide for themselves whether or not an idiot could have written those pages.

Now, as to the accusation, let me first say this: I would rather be a ranting idiot than a god-damn liar like most pharmacists who claim that the Ontario government is going to remove all the wonderful “services” than Ontario pharmacists perform for their beloved customers, when the government tries to reduce the outrageous cost of pills in drugstores through the elimination of glutinous kickbacks to drugstores, bribed so they will sell cheaper generic drugs.

Keep that always in mind as you listen over the next months to pharmacists whimpering and sobbing about how poor they are. What all persons of common sense and good will must be engaged upon sooner or later in this argument is: reduction of the obscene cost of health care, as charged by Big Pharma, by gouging drugstores, by doctors, by hospitals. The Ontario government is nearly broke. If health care like drug costs keep heading toward the roof, the only people without a patch on their impoverished asses will be pharmacists toodling by in their Ferraris.

The Ontario government is going to cut the cost of generic drugs in half and ban the obscene, cushy “professional allowances.” Let’s be clear and honest. Those “professional allowances” are crybaby kickbacks. The burden of those kickbacks are added by generic drugmakers to the cost of generic drugs. Guess who pays? That’s right. You. The pharmacists’ beloved customers.

Notice how pharmacists have taken to calling the customers “Our patients” this week? Makes a feller feel all warm and cuddly now, don’t it? If only those same pharmacists were not such god-damn greedy, squeezing liars.

Fabrice Taylor in the Globe & Mail Report on Business (April 15, 2010) wrote: “The pharmacy industry says the allowances are spent on customer services. That’s clearly not true. Analysts all say that the loss of the allowances will sharply cut profits.”

So, while your salary freezes or disappears in a lay-off, pharmacists want to continue gobbing and swilling at the hog trough of pig glut. What do they want? What every capitalist swine has always wanted: More for me; less for you.

Ads in newspapers and signs in some drugstores claim that, when the Ontario government takes away the 750 million dollars in blackmail (aka ‘professional allowances’) that the government pays to pharmacists to coddle them so they will sell cheaper generic drugs, the poor bedraggled druggists will have to stop all the glorious “services” they perform. Now, if much of that 750 million-dollar boodle scam actually went to providing customer “services”, well, their claim might be true. But it is not. Pharmacists are great big fat liars. That money goes slammo-whammo-presto-greedo right into their obscene profits and into the pockets of big pharmacy chains’ stockholders.

Poor limping granny blown in her rags by the winds of poverty into the front door of the drugstore gets…… not one thin dime.

Certified idiot that I am, am I the only person saying this? No indeed! Check all the coverage of this government/drugstore hissy fit by the best reporter in Ontario presently covering this, Adam Radwanski of The Globe & Mail, Canada’s newspaper of best record.

One more quote from the Fabrice Taylor article: “These legal kickbacks put a lot of money in the jeans of Shoppers shareholders – $150-million annually, according to one analyst. But even Mr. Schreiber knew that revenue was at risk. It was nice while it lasted, but it's over now. Move on.” (Mr. Jurgen Schreiber is the CEO of Shoppers Drug Mart).

To conclude, I have many problems with the government of Dalton McGuinty, but not on this move. This is an attempt to reduce the bloated cost of drugs in Ontario. Big drug companies and big pharmacy chains are heartless greedsters. Like monster vines climbing, burgeoning, choking the light from the garden of health, they must be cut back by the razor-keen machete of fiscal prudence.

Remember too, pharmacy has a history, not entirely unflecked with shit.