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US Drugmaker Raises Price of Vitamins By More Than 800% (ft.com)
David Crow, reporting for the Financial Times: A US drugmaker is charging almost $300 for a bottle of prescription vitamins that can be bought online for less than $5, in the latest attempt at price gouging in the world's largest healthcare market. Avondale Pharmaceuticals raised the price of Niacor, a prescription-only version of niacin, by 809 per cent last month, taking a bottle of 100 tablets from $32.46 to $295 (Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source), according to figures seen by the Financial Times. Although niacin, a type of vitamin B3, is available in over-the-counter forms for less than $5 per 100 tablets, some doctors still prefer to use the version approved by the US Food and Drug Administration to treat high cholesterol. Avondale, a secretive Alabama-based company, put the price of Niacor up shortly after acquiring the rights to the medicine in a so-called "buy-and-raise" deal -- a strategy made famous by Martin Shkreli, the disgraced biotech entrepreneur.
These idiot pharmaceutical companies are just going to bring massive government regulation down on their heads by pulling this shit for short-term gains.
How about this? Give the FDA the power to investigate cases of rampant profiteering due to any medical-related patents. If a company is found guilty of profiteering, all patents related to the case are invalidated. Patents are a grant by the government (and the people it represents) to protect original research, which we want to encourage. But when companies abuse that private-public contract, they should be punished accordingly by the loss of those patents.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Prescription niacin does have a different formulation from over-the-counter niacin and more importantly, you are guaranteed it will have exactly the amount of niacin it says on the label.
Looking up the composition in manufacturers labelling, that is not true in this case. This is a perfectly ordinary 500 mg of niacin in a perfectly conventional tableting composition (croscarmellose sodium, hydrogenated soybean oil, magnesium stearate, microcrystalline cellulose). There is absolutely nothing special about this.
And 500 mg of niacin is not some special calibrated dose, nor is the body sensitive to the exact amount of niacin ingested. The dosing for chlolesterol treatment is basically to take it in large excess (1000-3000 mg/day), the body excretes the excess.
And I googled "vitamin fraud" and found no indication that there were any problems with vitamins from name brand manufacturers (off-brand generics are of course problematic).
So none of your reasons are applicable in this case. Indeed this looks like an invitation to separate corrupt MDs, profiting from kick-backs, from real doctors who care about their patients. All a real doctor need do is recommend a name-brand niacin tablet as a replacement. Even at the pre-jack-up price of $33 a bottle they should have done that. The special name on the bottle is worth little or nothing/
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
CEO's are psychopaths. They don't "catch on" anymore than mafia bosses or drug lords catch on.
Why are CEO's psychopaths ? Because we want them that way. Shareholders want the best return on their investments, and manipulative, cut-throat, ruthless, heartless, soulless psychopaths are always more efficient than any other person who would take moral and ethical matters into consideration. So eventually, psychopath always end-up being the ones to keep their job.
That's an unavoidable side effect of corporatism.
... more importantly, you are guaranteed it will have exactly the amount of niacin it says on the label.
If I have this right:
Actually, you're guaranteed that the company did tests that show that, if it is not beyond the expiration date and hasn't been improperly stored, the drug will have at least 95% of the activity it claims on the label (for the on-label applications).
That's a heck of a lot tighter than OTC vitamins (even absent fraud). But let's be careful about saying "exactly".
(Lots of drugs are still quite potent far beyond their labelled expiration dates, though you don't necessarily know HOW potent. The manufacturing-to-expiration time is often when the company decided the formulation had adequate shelf life and stopped paying for testing, rather than the point where the drug degraded enough that it was close to missing the potency requirements.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Take an active role in your health care and question why you can't use a generic ...
And remember that, for some things, you really shouldn't use the generic - even when the FDA and your insurance company say it's just fine.
For example: Synthroid. This is a drug where:
- the activity level is critical - you're replacing (all or part of) an important signal in a broken (or degraded) feedback loop with a constant output
- but (unlike insulin) the tests are not easy enough to do real-time to recreate the feedback loop - so you take them every few months and adjust accordingly
- being off too far can cause permanent neurological and other damage
- the generic formulations are often far off the claimed dose, degrade at a different rate than the brand-name drug, or (in some cases) appear to be counterfeit with no activity whatsoever
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
... while every private insurance provider will negotiate low costs or threaten to drop them from the covered list, Medicare has no choice but to pay whatever the asking price is.
Here's my complaint. After my wife was diagnosed with a brain tumor (GBM) the day before Thanksgiving 2005, she was prescribed Temodar for her chemotherapy treatment. The list price for one month of treatment (literally, one bottle of pills) was $11,000 US. The price using my BC/BS was $1,100 (10% copay) and the price using her Optima HMO was $40 -- and she would have required several months of treatment. If the drug maker can afford to sell drugs at the reduced/negotiated price to those people with insurance, they can afford to sell it at that price to everyone. Anything else is simply greed.
Susan died seven weeks after diagnosis in Jan 2006, having never finished that first bottle of meds.
Remember Sue...
A side note about that particular medication. The label warned to avoid handling the pills and breathing any pill dust as it can cause lung cancer. Really nice stuff...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
As usual, you seem to be talking out of your ass. The Martin Shkreli case is about a 64 year old drug, Dataprim, which has a small pool of users. Shkreli relied mostly on market inefficiency to raise the price. Basically, they bought Dataprim with the intention of raising the price, so they targeted a medically necessary drug that had no currently available alternatives. In their purchase agreement they required the previous owner to shut down 2nd party distribution to make sure no one could undercut their price. They knew since the user pool was so small, there would be limited incentive for other drug manufacturers to invest in producing a generic alternative.
The only role the FDA played was that they would require that a new dug actually be tested to ensure that it does what it's supposed to do, so they would have increased the cost to produce a new version of the drug by requiring quality control.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
To be fair, Americans tend to mean communism when they say socialism, not social democracy (e.g. Labour in the UK or the SPD in Germany), which is what Europeans tend to associate with that same word. On the other hand, many Americans (GP included) seem to think there are only two options: corporatocracy under a thin veil of makebelieve capitalism, like in the US, and communism, with no shades of grey and no other possibilities. Probably a symptom of living in a two-party system where everything is dumbed down to two possiblities.