Posted on 01/14/2018 9:55:41 AM PST by Kaslin
2018 has barely finished dawning, and already, the pharmaceutical industry once more has egg on its face from outrageous price hikes.
This time, the culprit is pharmaceutical startup NextSource, which apparently has taken a 40-year-old cancer drug known as lomustine, and ruthlessly hiked its price from $50/pill in 2013, to $768/pill now. In other words, they’ve raised the price of the drug by over 1400% over the past five years.
NextSource’s defense for why this has happened has to be read to be believed. CBS News reports that the company’s CEO, Robert DiCrisci, claims that the company set the price based on the costs it incurred in developing the drug, and “the benefits it provides patients.”
Now, obviously, the drug has been around for 40 years, so the costs of developing it to NextSource, which only acquired the rights to it in 2013, have likely been nonexistent. Which means that the company set the price entirely on the basis of the fact that the drug benefits patients, or to put it more bluntly, the fact that patients need the drug in order to not die. “Nice life you’ve got there, shame if anything happened to it,” is essentially their reasoning. Granted, NextSource is far from the only pharma company to hike its prices with the new year – the practice is still distressingly widespread – but it is the most egregious.
Now, sure, some True Conservatives ™ might read this news and loosen their bowties just enough to nasally intone that that’s how markets work, and what are you, a socialist? And you know what? If this were a price that was set in anything that looked remotely like a free market, they’d have at least a point about the process involved. But, and I will repeat this point until I’m blue in the face, the drug market is not a free market. Rather, it is an assortment of monopolies or near-monopolies that drug companies will move heaven and earth to protect, so that they can go on charging any price they want. In fact, lomustine, which has somehow never been developed into a generic drug in 40 years of existing, is a perfect example of how these practices can lead to de facto monopolies, long after their legal foundations erode. If a generic version of lomustine existed – in other words, if market competition were introduced – it is highly dubious that the drug would fetch even a fraction of its original cost, let alone the gouged nightmare it has become.
And make no mistake, Big Pharma very much wants us to remain at the mercy of their monopolistic practices, and not to be subjected to market forces. The fate of lomustine is what they would impose on every single drug on earth, if they could. You can tell because every legislative or policy-driven attempt to introduce market forces, or to curb price gouging in their absence, is on Pharma’s hit list.
The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO)’s common sense attempt to crack down on unfairly renewed and issued patents through the Inter Partes Review process? Pharma’s against it, even though it has almost never gone against them.
The CREATES Act, which would enable generic drug manufacturers to purchase samples of brand name drugs once they got approval from the FDA, rather than letting pharma go on abusing the Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategies (REMS) program? Pharma blatantly lied about what it would do, to try and sink it.
The 340B drug pricing program, which enables safety net hospitals, rural hospitals, children’s hospitals, and any number of other underfunded institutions to purchase drugs at lower prices, as a condition of Pharma’s continued access to taxpayer dollars? Pharma has campaigned against it for years, and cheered its being gutted by friends of theirs at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS ), though Congress may resolve this particular mistake.
In other words, lomustine’s hike is a powerful and needed reminder of what the future of the US drug market will look like if the pharmaceutical industry is not held to account. Fortunately, bipartisan coalitions exist to challenge them. With any luck, 2018 will prove to be for those coalitions what it should also be for President Trump: a year of action.
Bookmarking this. A friend of mine and I argue about this sort of thing all the time.
IIRC you have ten years from the time the drug comes to market before it goes into the generic category.
Or are we using the Disney rule?
Allow for the REIMPORTATION of pharmaceuticals and medical devices back into the US at current world prices.....US prices collapse anywhere from 50-80%. This was one of Trump’s campaign healthcare planks, #7 I believe. Too bad those healthcare campaign policies have disappeared......
I see that they’re taking notes from Pharma-Bro Shkreli.
Big pharma and the FDA doings.
>>the drug market is not a free market.
Cash-Cattle for the techno-kleptocrats feeding from the “market”.
Soon the inmates running the asylum will realize their Transhumanist augmented wet-dreams — sans any moral constraint at all.
Too bad the cube-slaves riding the Utopian Collective-corporate Enterprise don’t have a 1st amendment responsibility to point out the bridge is crewed by crazy people.
It’s amazing what people will do when they’re not in fear for their lives.
This is why we passed trust busting policies.
This type of egregious and vicious behavior should be punished.
And it is NOT Conservative to support it.
True conservatism takes into account human greed and cruelty and establishment of REASONABLE LAWS AND REGULATIONS to prevent it!
Psychopathy is a personality disorder characterized by a lack of empathy and remorse, shallow affect, glibness, manipulation and callousness.
Now that NextSource has put up a big price umbrella, any other drug maker should be able to get under it and make big profits selling a generic version at even a third of NextSource's price. The article gives no explanation as to why a generic version is not produced.
Obviously, these drugs are worth only what one is willing to pay for it.
If you’ve got one foot on a banana peel and the other in a grave, then they’re worth the world to you if they are what’s keeping you out of that grave.
The real question is when do the prices on drugs become usury?
There are laws banning loan-sharking and usurious interest rates. Should we be putting limits on usurious drug prices? $475k/yr for a Kymriah treatment for certain types of blood cancers, Yescarta costs $373,000. The brain tumor treatment called Alecensa is priced at nearly $160,000 a year.
This certainly feels like loan-shark type prices.
The question becomes what are the manufacturing costs, shelf life, and volume(s). I would think a 100% markup is probably enough, most medical device makers charge 350% markups.
The powers that be want no cure for cancer. Too much money to be made by keeping people sick and medicated and to kill them slowly
I agree. You mentioned “devices”. I use a CPAP. The supplies for this thing are just out of this world. I’m talking hundreds of dollars for something that should be 10 or 20 bucks, such as a nose cup and strap assembly. Another example is an air filter the size of a thumb nail made of felt for $20.
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Better way: Take “English Ivy Extract” tablets from “nature’s Way” and learn to sleep on your side.
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They haven’t disappeared, they are at the mercy of congress, the same ones from last weeks Trump David Accords. Like Arafat, when the Israelis called his bluff he walked out-one must want a deal to make one.
The DNC and GOPe do not want nor care about America, American Sovereignty, nor Liberty and Justice for all Americans. They have theirs, they believe they are the illuminati of the world. They are delusional in their lust for power. As hard as it may seem, the Christian world must begin to pray as never before. Even so, Lord Jesus Come. Amen
One hundred fifty years ago people may have dreamed about drugs that could cure cancer. They didn't even have drugs that could cure an infected toenail.
If Americans really want to show those evil drug companies who's boss, they will simply refuse to buy any drugs developed in the US. Russia, China, India, and maybe Venezuela will step in and pick up the slack.
The drug I take costs my insurance company $300 per day. It's the only drug approved by the FDA for my condition which only occurs with 5000 people per year nationwide. If it wasn't for the fact that this drug cures many other types of disease, I probably couldn't get it at any price.
Apparently anybody is free to start their own company, begin manufacturing the very expensive drug mentioned in the article, and make a fortune. What a great country.
Medical Industrial Complex. Too bad Ike didn’t warn us about that.
That is the the problem, they are NOT free to do so.
One company owns the patent. They are the only ones who can make it.
Why a 40 year old drug is under patent is a good question.
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