Literally Blood-Sucking the Poor to Make Their Billions

[kpete]

Cerberus Capital: Literally Blood-Sucking the Poor to Make Their Billions

By Mark Ames, AlterNet. Posted January 9, 2010.

How one company made $1.8 billion by paying peanuts to human plasma donors, and then manipulated the market by restricting supply to the desperately ill.

Wall Street vampires. Lately, a lot of Americans, including myself, have used the bloodsucking monsters as a metaphor to describe the Wall Street billionaires who rule us, and who are ruining us. Like so many awful stories of the past few years, it turns out that these Wall Street vampire-billionaires really exist, literally. Like all vampires, they live in remote castles, and they feed themselves by luring poor, desperate humans into their dens, hooking them into blood-pumping machines and sucking out their plasma for mind-boggling profits.

Cerberus Capital, one of Wall Street’s most notoriously ruthless leveraged-buyout firms (or “private equity firms” in PC-speak), recently made a $1.8 billion killing on its human plasma investment, a company called Talecris. Talecris was purchased for a mere $82.5 million just four years earlier, meaning Cerberus made 23 times its investment on human plasma. This was accomplished by the most savage, heartless means possible: by paying peanuts to impoverished human plasma donors, who increasingly come from Mexican border towns to blood-pumping stations set up on the American side, jacking up the price of plasma by restricting supply (a lawsuit filed by the Federal Trade Commission accused Cerberus Plasma Holdings of “operating as an oligopoly”), and then selling the refined products to the most desperately ill—patients suffering from hemophilia, severe burns, multiple sclerosis and autoimmune deficiencies. The products cost so much—one, IVIG (intravenous immunoglobulin) cost twice the price of gold as of last summer—that American health insurance companies have been dropping or denying their policyholders in increasing numbers, endangering untold numbers of people.

Tomas Asher, chairman of a company that trades in plasma, described the business this way: "It's like selling hog bellies or wheat or beef. It gets sold all over."

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more:
http://www.alternet.org/workplace/145044/cerberus_capital%3A_literally_blood-sucking_the_poor_to_make_their_billions

[earthboundmisfit]

1. There's gotta be some kind of karma

to be paid for this. Fucking monsters.

[ThomCat]

8. That is one of the big flaws in putting faith in religion.

There is absolutely no evidence and no reason to believe that there is a greater being that will punish these people for their evil. There is no sign at all that any being exists at all, much less has any interest in our lives and affairs. :(

I would love to see signs of God just to be able to believe that evil is punished. It would be nice to believe that they don't get away with shit like this. (though the idea that anything warrants eternal, unending torture as a punishment is far too extreme to ever be justified.)

If they get away with being evil and ruining our lives, then evil pays, and it pays pretty damned well.

WE have to regulate and legislate and govern to deal with evil here in our own lifetimes. This is all the chance we have, and we can't pass the buck to anyone or anything else out there.

Which makes it all the more horrible when they get away with crimes like this. :(

[earthboundmisfit]

10. That's damn right

SO damn right.

[varelse]

2. Free Market forces at work

:puke:

[unkachuck]

3. thank you, President Obama....

....for allowing this scum to continue to fuck us....

[jpak]

19. How is Obama responsible? He isn't - nice try though

:thumbsdown:

[whistler162]

25. You mean thank you VP Quayle!

[dkf]

4. And we thought they couldn't exploit Mexicans more than using them for cheap labor.

Ha they showed us.

[jwirr]

23. The Constant Gardener has come home to our boarders.

[Donnachaidh]

5. my son is a hemophiliac, and he had to get factor a couple of months ago

The bill just for the factor was twelve THOUSAND dollars. For ONE treatment. Luckily he has the mild form. I cannot imagine what a parent of a severe child would go through, having to infuse daily.

There is a special place in hell for these companies and the people who run them.

[notadmblnd]

6. Cerberus, isn't that an offshoot of Carlyle?

Same BFEE investors?

[mistertrickster]

7. Cerberus is the name of Dante's three headed dog that guards the gates of Hell. Appropriate. nt.

[SmileyRose]

9. There's a VERY EASY WAY to stop this.

Everyone who can should be donating blood and/or plasma as often as possible. And we need to just fucking end the restriction against gay men donating blood products.

[guitar man]

11. There's another way to stop it if that doesn't work

The time is approaching when the only solution left in response to such deplorable behavior by our ruling class will be for angry mobs to drag them into the streets.I abhor violence but will not completely rule out its use as a last resort. Every day I read more and more stories of exploitation and abuse by the billionaire class, and every day o come closer to thinking that it would be a good day for the masses to finally drop the hammer on them.

It's getting to the point where it seems there is never going to be any change in the behavior of the priveleged class unless they truly fear us. :grr:

[SmileyRose]

12. Violence won't work

the real power brokers are people we have never or rarely seen, and generally we do not even know their names. We can kill off their paid servants and useful idiots but that does not stop them.

The problem is, the predators are not the only ones who are greedy. Too often we "little people" are more than willing to trample the well being of our neighbors for a few more scraps. The predators count on this and use it.

[guitar man]

16. I don't know

Kill off enough paid servants and useful idiots and they might find themselves hard put to fins anybody to fill those positions after while.

I know it sounds extreme but it seems to me more and more every day that they own the whole system lock stock and barrel. Doesn't matter who gets elected, it seems they have mechanisms built into the system that assures their continued opulence no matter what.

If there is a way to get them to behave responsibly without bloodshed I'm all ears, but after almost 30 straight years of toxic deregulation and permissiveness we have created a monster in the upper crust that needs to be vanquished or we will never see any significant progress.

[hootinholler]

15. Man

You know I have been wondering about that too.

-Hoot

[ThomCat]

13. How would that help?

If they own donations of plasma, they could artificially withhold supply from the market to create an artificial shortage. That is what the article is saying they did, actually, so there is no reason they couldn't keep doing it.

With more product, they wouldn't need to withhold as much, create as much of a shortage, so the cost would not be as high, but because they would be selling more they would still make the same high profit, thanks to higher levels of donations. :(

I agree that discrimination against gay and bisexual men should end. There is no justification for that shit. But that is a separate issue from this company gouging because they can control the price of plasma.

[SmileyRose]

14. Does the Red Cross sell the plasma to these people?

Maybe I'm the one who is confused and I really hope the answer is no. I donate plasma on a regular basis and was told there was nothing charged to the patient for the plasma itself, but the hospital giving the plasma would charge a fee of about $60 for the cost of maintaining it's blood products.

[northernlights]

22. No. Red Cross donated plasma goes to hospitals and is used for transfusions

Companies like Cerebus buy the plasma for its component parts. IgG is a circulating antibody used to boost the immune response. For example, while my anatomy professor was a practicing nurse she was directly exposed to hepatitis during a patient emergency. She was prophylactically treated with IV IgG to prevent an infection from getting started.

[jwirr]

24. I'll bet they did not restrict gay men and women.

[madrchsod]

17. they are just like dog ticks......

sucking the blood until they kill the host

[Odin2005]

18. DISGUSTING!

[proud patriot]

20. Dispicable !

:grr:

[midnight]

21. It's just business. Money trumps peace.....

[Kermitt Gribble]

26. Hello... McFly??

What's it going to take for the White House and Congress to see that profiting from anything to do with health care should be illegal?

Who needs a conscience when you get a 7 or 8 figure bonus?:shrug: