Editorial
Stern Editor-in-Chief
Dirty dealings with cancer patients – editor-in-chief Gregor Peter-Schmitz on the current stern title
The current star– Cover: The Cancer Scandal. Dirty business with the terminally ill – how greedy investors enrich themselves thanks to the help of pharmacies and doctors
© star
A suspected cancer scandal and the question of how tolerant the capital really is for queer people are two topics that star– Editor-in-Chief Gregor Peter Schmitz in the current editorial highlights.
“Cancer” is a terrible word that no one wants to hear from their doctor. The word “metastasis” is an equally horrifying word, as it means that the tumor has spread to other parts of the body. Often enough, this amounts to a death sentence. A star-Team around Bernhard Albrecht (a trained doctor) and Oliver Schröm had to realize that dirty deals with cancer patients can also proliferate like metastases. They researched an expansive network of companies that operates in the highly lucrative market for cancer drugs and has its own interests firmly in view. The simple calculation: The more cancer drugs are sold, the richer the company gets – and the richer the doctors employed by the company probably get.
This story, that of star told on the basis of thousands of documents, deals with transactions worth millions, which have also called the public prosecutor’s office onto the scene. And she tells of a fundamental evil of the German health care system. In the cancer market alone there are three other major players who are primarily striving for returns. Other areas of outpatient medicine have long been in the sights of profit-driven businessmen: dentistry, ophthalmology and radiology, for example.
Investors are active wherever there is a lot of money to be made. They pick the raisins because they have to make as much money as possible as quickly as possible because their investors, not just multi-millionaires but also pension funds and insurance companies, expect high returns.
And we, who all sooner or later become patients, have to ask ourselves: What are the priorities of doctors who work with such locusts?
Is Berlin freedom just an illusion?
Berlin, that’s this metropolis where everything goes, where everyone can be happy in their own way, where the rainbow flag flies on every street corner. But what is it really like to roam the streets of the capital as a homosexual – and not only in the Mitte district – holding your partner by the hand, openly showing that you love, touch, kiss a man? Our reporter Stephan Seiler dared this self-experiment. So much can be revealed: Berlin’s great freedom is often just an illusion.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz has said goodbye to the political summer break, but before that he said a sentence by which he will have to be measured in the future. This reads: “I am quite confident that the AfD will not do much differently in the next federal election than in the last one.” In the meantime, the CDU boss Friedrich Merz has brought Carsten Linnemann to his side as the new Secretary General, who has been demanding a clear edge almost every week for many years, but is now finally allowed to demand it every day in the job description. This also makes it clear: Merz wants to become the “Clear Edge” candidate for chancellor.
Incidentally, he had once promised, quite clearly, to halve the AfD’s poll values.