The ESRD community needs to wake up and realize that Amgen is not our friend. Kevin Sharer, CEO of Amgen since 1999, has taken every tiny increase that Medicare and Congress has provided ESRD providers. He has taken this money, money that was earmarked to increase our cost for providing hemodialysis treatments, money that should have gone for new staff, staff raises and new equipment and improvements. Where did this money go? It was co-opted to purchase new biotechnoloy via an aggressive and massive acquisitions program. Amgen didn't have any new ideas, not that EPO was their idea, anyway.
Clearly, the entire ESRD provider community, including all staff and patients, has been hosed by Amgen. What has anyone done about it? Nothing! As for our representatives at the NRAA, they have climed in bed with the enemy. And, make no mistake about this, anyone who steals the bread out of your mouth is the enemy.
Kevin Sharer seems to have the shoes on the wrong feet. He feels that the ESRD provider community serves him. He feels that he is our master and that we all have to dance around like little organ grinder monkeys at his request. So far, that's exactly what is happening.
As for the NRAA, I fear that they have been purchased by Amgen. If a message is to be sent to Kevin Sharer it's going to have to come from the grass roots of those in the trenches, especially those in rural and independent facilites. Those voices are simply not being heard in Congress, at Medicare or at Amgen.
This is a sample of what Mr. Sharer's plans are for the monies that he has stolen from the ESRD provider community:
"AMGEN Growing Against the Grain Amgen CEO Kevin Sharer stands accused of remaking the world's biggest biotech company in the image of Big Pharma. But that might be a good thing. By Matthew Boyle
The Empire State ballroom at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in midtown Manhattan typically serves as the setting for the kind of stuffy, state-of-a-business luncheons that are more snooze inducing than buzz producing. But as Amgen CEO Kevin Sharer stepped up to the podium on a Tuesday morning in late March, the scene in front of him had the feel of a rock concert. Roughly 500 investors and analysts had crowded in, jostling for position at the biotech bellwether's first-ever R&D Day and expecting to be wowed.
Sharer has done plenty to stoke their curiosity. Since taking charge in April 2000, he has focused on radically remaking the Thousand Oaks, Calif., company while attempting not to upset its cherished biotech roots, a tricky balancing act that has created new stresses even as it has fixed old problems. The makeover embraces every aspect of Amgen's business, and has ushered in new people, new partners, and a new approach to the product pipeline. During the past three years, for example, Sharer has recruited a host of execs from buttoned-down pharmaceutical firms like Merck and Eli Lilly. And one of the most prominent new hires, whip-smart R&D chief Roger Perlmutter, has borrowed from the Big Pharma playbook to install a "command and control" approach to drug discovery that seeks to marry the free-form creativity of biotechs with the more traditional, calculating approach of their older rivals in the drug business. It's a new model�one that's being tested every day. But Amgen had no choice except to change. The biotech coasted through much of the 1990s, living off the nearly $17 billion in sales generated by two blockbuster drugs it had launched at the start of the decade, the protein-based injectable drugs Epogen (2003 sales of $2.4 billion) and Neupogen ($1.3 billion). With healthy profit margins, Amgen was converting plenty of those revenues into cash but very little of its R&D spending into the new products it needed to juice its easing growth."
No, my friends, no money was being put into R&D, that's why Amgen has had to purchase R&D. Where did that profit go? There was plenty of it. Billions. Well, at least you now know what your dollars are funding. Our composite rate increases have funded Amgen's massive biotech aquisition program. Furthermore, our dollars are underwriting Amgen's discounts of Epogen and Arenesp so that Amgen can compete with J&J's Procrit business.
It's time to stand up and say NO to Kevin Sharer. It's time to stop being little organ grinder monkeys.
