Drug giants threaten NHS with legal action over cheaper drug that could save £84m a year

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Fair enough, let them try. If they lose, they will open the floodgates. India has taken a very robust approach to pharmaceutical pricing.

If necessary, the next government that is committed to the NHS and the health of our citizens, and is not overwhelmed by sympathy for wealthy multinationals, can look at the law on such matters. At the moment the UK is part of the EU which is a large and important market, with enough power to lay down the law even to rich multinationals such as tax-dodging Google and Amazon. Next year we may be on our own.

You may be aware that in "the land of the free," great resentment has built up against profiteering pharmaceutical license-owners.

"EpiPen has gone from $100 for a two-pack in 2009 to $608 today. Usually, companies would be applauded for the ability to create revenue through such pricing power. But when it comes to life-saving drugs, consumers interpret these significant increases as the producer profiteering off a person’s life or death need."
http://fortune.com/2016/09/27/mylan-epipen-heather-bresch/

"The systematic attack on American’s seeking healthcare took an outlandish step recently. Gilead Sciences inc. came out with a new drug to treat Hepatitis C called Sovaldi. This new Big Pharma drug costs $1000.00 per pill, meaning a treatment plan would cost about $84,000.00, but only in America. If you live in Egypt, you would only pay $900.00 for the very same treatment plan. From $1,000.00 per pill in the US to just over $10.00 a pill in Egypt."

http://glutathionepro.com/big-pharma-profiteering-new-drug-sells-1000-per-pill/

"Some 11 of the 12 drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration in the US in 2012 were priced above $100,000 (£65,000) per patient per year, with the price of existing drugs that have proven effectiveness rising by up to threefold, the Independent reported."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/hea...profiteering-threatens-lives-say-doctors.html

"If we want to avoid another Martin Shkreli or an EpiPen pricing fiasco, this is how we need to deal with pharmaceuticals in future
These drugs are out of patent. Other firms could bring generic products to market and undercut the gougers. The fact that they aren’t doing so shows that the market is not working"
"In 2015 Turing Pharmaceuticals acquired the manufacturing licence for the antiparasitic drug Daraprim (taken by many HIV patients) and hiked its price from $13.5 a tablet to $750."
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices...maceutical-companies-capitalism-a7216606.html

This is a business model that works in a country where the healthcare industry is dedicated to high prices and maximising profits, but not in the European model where the state has a responsibility to contribute to healthcare costs.
 
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I for one would be quite happy to see EU healthcare organisations placing orders for patent-expired medicines with a generic maker, on volumes large enough to get a good price, if makers try to winch the price up excessively.

"In one case cited by The Times, the price of hydrocortisone tablets had been pushed up 12,500 percent, from 70 pence per packet in 2008 to the current £85, and it also highlights increases for doxepin 50mg tablets, which has jumped from £5.71 to £154 over the last five years, and dipipanone 10mg/cyclizine 30mg tablets, up from £9.57 to £353.06.

"The sort of pricing behaviour described in the Times investigation today - over 12,000 percent price increase for an old out of patent product - is cynical and exploitative," said Dr Richard Torbett, executive director commercial at the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry. "It does not reflect the values of our members who are focussed on researching and developing new medicines to meet the medical needs of NHS patients".

Inappropriate behaviour around the pricing of old medicines should be tackled, he said, but also noted that such examples are rare, "and overall the UK has a highly competitive market where competition drives efficiency and low prices".

A Department of Health spokesperson said: "These are serious allegations and no pharmaceutical company should be exploiting the NHS. The Secretary of State has asked the CMA to urgently look at the evidence uncovered by The Times as part of their continuing investigations into excessive drugs pricing.""

http://www.pharmatimes.com/news/nhs...te_profiteering,_investigation_claims_1034841
 
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The waste from patients over ordering on repeat prescription is something needs to be tackled. Years ago returned medication t to assist third world countries if the packing was still intact. Now they are unpackaged and incinerated. It can be hundreds of pounds per pharmacy per week.
 
bernardgreen said:
The waste from patients over ordering on repeat prescription is something needs to be tackled. Years ago returned medication t to assist third world countries if the packing was still intact. Now they are unpackaged and incinerated. It can be hundreds of pounds per pharmacy per week.
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There is waste in over ordering by pharmacies and Boots was doing this to meet its sales targets. If you are on medications you should have a medication review to check which meds you actually need. A lot of pharmacies keep supplying older people with meds they dont take anymore.
 
Kankerot said:
A lot of pharmacies keep supplying older people with meds they dont take anymore.
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Only if the patient or their carer / relative askes for the (repeat) prescription to be filled. Which happens even if the patient no longer needs the nedication,

Yes the review should happen more frequently and the repeat prescriptions more closely monitored
 
waste of medication is entirely separate from price-gouging.

Though wasting a dozen tablets at 10p each is less serious than the same tablets priced at £100 each.
 
more about the fuss in trumpland...

The "New Yorker" said:
"What with a former peanut-company owner, Stewart Parnell, being sent to prison for knowingly selling salmonella-tainted peanut butter, and Volkswagen’s C.E.O., Martin Winterkorn, resigning after revelations about the cheat software in the firm’s diesel-powered cars, it took a special magnitude of corporate misbehavior to make the business-news headlines in the past couple of weeks. But Martin Shkreli, the C.E.O. of Turing Pharmaceuticals, managed it when his company said it was raising the price of a sixty-two-year-old lifesaving drug from $13.50 to seven hundred and fifty dollars a pill. The move quickly became a major scandal; Shkreli was called “the most hated man in America.” Yet the true scandal of Turing’s profiteering scheme was that it was entirely legal."
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/12/taking-on-the-drug-profiteers

Another source reports:
"Logic suggests that drugs that have been around for a while should decline in price, in part because they are cheap and easy to make; in part because they face competition from generic manufacturers. It turns out that isn’t the case.

Part of the problem is that there are individuals like Shkreli scouring the market for drugs like Daraprim that don’t have effective generic rivals (perhaps that market is too small for a generic drug maker to view it is profitable; perhaps, as in Daraprim’s case, there are unique issues surrounding the requirements for regulatory testing) or other factors that give the drug a lot of effective pricing power. The profit-minded individual or company snaps up the patents, suddenly hikes the drug’s price and puts consumers – from insurance companies to individuals – in a position of either paying what is demanded or going without.

Late this summer, Rodelis Therapeutics boosted the cost of 30 tablets of cycloserine, a tuberculosis drug, from $500 to $10,800. When the Mayo Clinic made the price hike public, the company returned the rights to the medication to the Chao Center for Industrial Pharmacy & Contract Manufacturing, from which it had acquired them. Early in the year, Valeant Pharmaceuticals International Inc boosted the prices of two heart drugs, Nitropress and Isuprel, by 525% and 212% on the same day that they acquired them. “Our duty is to shareholders and to maximize the value” of Valeant’s products, a company spokeswoman told the Wall Street Journal at the time."
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news...eering-cost-prescription-drugs-martin-shkreli

Obviously the unregulated Free Market has no morality.

But elected governments have a duty to protect their citizens' interests.

Roll on the next election.
 
Perhaps if the national HS stopped being the international HS, and the millions of migrants stopped using a service to which they had paid nothing into, then there would be more money to spend on the legal action against the drug companies? Oh, and patient care.
 
^woody^ said:
Perhaps if the national HS stopped being the international HS, and the millions of migrants stopped using a service to which they had paid nothing into, then there would be more money to spend on the legal action against the drug companies? Oh, and patient care.
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Keep banging on the broken drum. I have posted before why the issue is simply overblown and money wasted with PFI dwarfs it. But keep it up.
 
JohnD said:
If necessary, the next government that is committed to the NHS and the health of our citizens, and is not overwhelmed by sympathy for wealthy multinationals, can look at the law on such matters
Click to expand...

new drug pricing legislation, the Health Service Medical Supplies (Costs) Act 2017
The Act, which has broad cross-party support, clarifies and extends the Government’s powers to regulate the cost of medicines and medical supplies and to collect sales and pricing information. Its primary purpose is to limit the NHS’s spiralling drugs bill.

Lets hope it has the powers to deal with the drugs investigated by the times.

Companies have been investigated and fined before:

Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) imposed a record £84.2 million fine on the pharmaceutical manufacturer Pfizer

 
On the radio this morning it said that the NHS was losing a billion £ a year in fiddeling / fraud.
 
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