HAPPY NEW YEAR
A Decade Marked By Outrage Over Drug Prices
Martin Shkreli, the former CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, who was called before Cummings' committee in2016. After hiking the price of an old drug for parasitic infections to $750 a pill from $13.50, Shkreli became the poster boy for pharmaceutical greed that helped define the past decade.
Meanwhile, nearly 1 in 4 Americans has trouble affording prescription drugs, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation poll.
Of relevance, perhaps to our NA members, Daraprim: An old drug gets a huge new price
For decades, Daraprim has been the go-to medicine for treating toxoplasmosis, a parasitic infection especially dangerous for people with compromised immune systems, such as people living with HIV and patients who've undergone organ transplants.
The drug was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1953, and its patents expired long ago. But there wasn't a generic version available, and there was only one supplier in the United States. Even so, Daraprim cost just $13.50 a pill in early 2015.
Then Turing Pharmaceuticals bought the rights to the drug and raised its list price more than 5,000% overnight.
Another company called Valeant did the same year when it bought two old heart drugs — Isuprel and Nitropress — that had little competition.
Despite public outcry, Daraprim's price hasn't budged.
Today, many health insurance companies won't pay for the drug, and it's too expensive for many hospitals to keep in stock, says Armstrong. As a result, she says, doctors have been forced to turn to cheaper alternatives that have more side effects and less proof that they work.
Then there is EpiPen, used to counteract allergic reactions.
By the time the EpiPen's list price reached $300 per auto-injector in 2016, its manufacturer, Mylan, had made more than a dozen price hikes in just six years.
People clamored for a cheaper generic of the product, which injects a dose of epinephrine to counteract allergic reactions. Mylan had a virtual monopoly on it. In the spring of 2016, the FDA had rejected two applications from other firms that wanted to make generic versions.
State and federal lawmakers took notice. For years, they had been passing laws that pushed for schools and other public places to have EpiPens on hand.
Mylan started offering its own generic at half the price in December 2016 and left the price of its brand-name product where it was. Mylan's new version is called an authorized generic. These are usually introduced to undercut competition from other companies' generics — and eat into some of the competitors' profits.
Next consider Sovaldi: a first-of-its-kind hepatitis C drug, priced at $1,000 per pill. To rid a patient of the hepatitis C virus would cost $84,000 per person.
State health systems struggled to pay for the treatment, and health insurers denied the drug to all but the sickest patients. An investigation led by Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley and Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden found that state Medicaid programs spent more than $1 billion on the drug in 2014, but less than 2.4% of Medicaid patients with hepatitis C got Sovaldi.
Now, there are a few other brand-name hepatitis C cures on the market, creating some competition.
Finally: Insulin
After insulin was discovered nearly 100 years ago, the rights to it were transferred to the University of Toronto for $1 so that insulin could be made widely available at a low cost.
But insulin prices have continued to creep upward at a rate that's higher than inflation. As a result, some patients have rationed their medicine, skipping doses or cutting them in half.
In 2017, a group of patients sued the three major insulin-makers — Sanofi, Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk — when they noticed that the companies were increasing their prices in lockstep.