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.

Comments

blame government

[Anonymous Coward]

Goverment regulations cause this problem. Now that we are getting rid of NObamacare, this problem will go away. GUARANTEED.

Socialism is an easy fix for cases like this.

[Anonymous Coward]

Socialism is an easy fix for cases like this. In a socialist system this vitamin wouldn't even be available because it never would have been developed in the first place.

Re:Socialism is an easy fix for cases like this.

[harvey the nerd]

Nationalized medicine would be the death of many of us. In tightly controlled countries, like Canada and in Europe, you can't get many cheap drugs - they simply aren't available at all vs I can get them in Asia for 1-5 cents. In Asia, I pay 2 cents per pill for an "obsolete drug" that stops some common forms of cancer metastasis but is unadvertised, ignored and/or unavailable in most of the world. This saves me $20-30,000 a month in the US for a biotech drug.

Surprise! Companies are in it for profit!

[Puls4r]

With corporate behavior like this, can anyone aside from Idget Pai really claim that Internet Providers won't create fast lanes the first chance they get?

Re:Today's translations:

[layabout]

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"

escaping authoritarian medicine

[harvey the nerd]

Free market medical move #1 was ending the ACA (Obamacare) mandate which would financially lock most people into FDA monopoly medicines and often poorly performing maimstream medicine.

Many problems can be better addressed by the closer-to-natural-biochemistry of supplements, but first you need a little money leftover to start.

Re:escaping authoritarian medicine

[tbannist]

That's a load of bull shit.