PharmacyChecker Blog

Helping Americans Get The Truth About Prescription Drug Savings
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Do Google & Bing censor online pharmacy search results? Pharmaceutical companies have called for censorship.

Until we lower drug prices here at home in America, online access to affordable medication internationally is clearly essential. But what if we lived in a country where people were no longer able to find safe international options online?

In an ideal world, search algorithms empower consumers to find the exact information they are looking for on these search engines. In a recent Google algorithm update (March 2019), which affected the “natural” or “organic,” non-paid search results, we wonder if there was foul play involved in which Google was caving in to Big Pharma. The Electronic Frontier Foundation identified this problem in 2016, in “How Big Pharma’s Shadow Regulation Censors the Internet.

The results at the very top of your Google search are often ads, which are of course paid placement: a different problem.

Please check out our new video on this difficult and troubling topic of censorship of online pharmacy and drug prices content.

Those patients searching on Google for information about affording medicine through online pharmacies were significantly disadvantaged by the Google March 2019 Core Update. The reason is that results for PharmacyChecker ‘s verification and pricing information are now much harder to find than they were on March 11th, 2019— a day before the update.

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Big Pharma Playbook on Internet Pharmacies Exposed

Big Pharma Blocks Online AccessCentral to Big Pharma’s lobbying efforts is relying on drug company-funded “nonprofit” groups to sanitize their goals under the veneer of charity. Investigative reporting in Tarbell, a media organization founded by healthcare activist Wendell Potter, shows that drug companies, namely Eli Lilly, successfully lobbied the Obama administration to make Internet companies embrace policies that curtail online access to affordable medication.

These pharma-funded nonprofits engage fellow industry-tied patient groups, the media and people, promoting the idea that rogue online pharmacies and safe international online pharmacies are the same thing. Their message: don’t buy lower-cost medications online from other countries because it’s too dangerous.

That message is an outright lie.

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Trump’s State of the Union: Drug Prices ‘Will Come Down’

“One of my greatest priorities is to reduce the price of prescription drugs. In many other countries, these drugs cost far less than what we pay in the United States.There are not many issues you can hear both Republicans and Democrats clapping about in unison, but high drug prices is definitely one of them. Echoing his 2016 campaign, President Trump again proclaimed during his State of the Union address Tuesday night that his administration is determined “to make fixing the injustice of high drug prices one of our top priorities.”

Speeding up the approval of lower-cost generics was noted by Trump as “exciting progress,” but nothing substantial has been done by the Trump administration on drug prices. The appointment of Alex Azar to head the Department of Health and Human Services department was a major disappointment. As president of Eli Lilly USA, Azar oversaw major price hikes on lifeline medications, such as insulin.

Appealing to both his base and popular opinion, President Trump could use his executive authority immediately to more expressly permit Americans to buy medication from international pharmacies.

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