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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
... 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. . . .