Tag Archives: generic

Exorbitant Medicine Costs -Generics Discounts Often Minimal

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A recent story in the NY Times (Patients Eagerly Awaited a Generic Drug. Then They Saw The Price. ) shows that the availability of a generic drug does not guarantee that exorbitant pricing will be remedied.

An excerpt:

Syprine, which treats a rare condition known as Wilson disease, gained notoriety after Valeant Pharmaceuticals International raised the price of the drug to $21,267 in 2015 from $652 just five years earlier…

In promoting its “lower-cost” alternative to Syprine, a Teva executive boasted in a news release that the product “illustrates Teva’s commitment to serving patient populations in need.”

What the release didn’t mention was the price: Teva’s new generic will cost $18,375 for a bottle of 100 pills, according to Elsevier’s Gold Standard Drug Database. That’s 28 times what Syprine cost in 2010, and hardly the discount many patients were waiting for.

Nearly three years after Valeant’s egregious price increases ignited public outrage, the story of Syprine highlights just how hard it can be to bring down drug prices once they’ve been set at stratospheric levels.

My take: This type of excessive drug cost is why critics demand additional regulation be placed over the entire pharmaceutical industry; it can occur only in a system which has limited competition and indirectly shares the cost across the entire system by having insurance companies foot most of the bill.

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Pharmaceutical Prescription Practices Tied to Pharmaceutical Payments to Doctors

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A recent buzz has developed regarding a ProPublica study showing an association between the amount of money physicians receive from pharmaceutical companies and their likelihood of recommending brand (rather than generic) prescription drugs.

Here’s a link to the full story: Now There’s Proof: Docs Who Take Company Cash Tend to Prescribe More Brand-Name Meds

“The more money doctors receive from drug and medical device companies, the more brand-name drugs they tend to prescribe, a new ProPublica analysis shows. Even a meal can make a difference.”

Here’s a link to NPR’s summary:  Drug-Company Payments Mirror Doctors’ Brand-Name Prescribing  An excerpt:

“A ProPublica analysis has found that doctors who receive payments from the medical industry do indeed prescribe drugs differently on average than their colleagues who don’t. And the more money they receive, the more brand-name medications they tend to prescribe.

We matched records on payments from pharmaceutical and medical device makers in 2014 with corresponding data on doctors’ medication choices in Medicare’s prescription drug program.

Doctors who got money from drug and device makers prescribed a higher percentage of brand-name drugs overall than doctors who didn’t, our analysis showed. Even those who simply got meals from companies prescribed more brand-name drugs, on average.”

My take: Prescription patterns vary widely among physicians and often for good reason.  At the same time, it is likely that in many cases variation in prescription patterns is influenced by frequent contact with pharmaceutical companies.  As a consequence, this has the potential to make patients question whether their physician always has their best interest in mind and the potential to increase healthcare costs.

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Law Library Ceiling, Univ Michigan