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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.
Goverment regulations cause this problem. Now that we are getting rid of NObamacare, this problem will go away. GUARANTEED.
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. Unlike OTC vitamins where the ingredients list is more advisory rather than actual. For a multitude of examples of capitalism in action, Google "vitamin fraud"