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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.
Eat Vegemite.
"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 [overpriced prescription] version"
Translation: Doctors get a kickback from prescribing a vitamin. Clueless patients fill the prescription and send it to their insurance. Everybody loses except doctors and drug companies.
"approved by the US Food and Drug Administration"
Translation: FDA approved vitamins that other vitamin manufacturers either cant get approval for or have to spend a fortune to get.
So drug company gets a government monopoly on a vitamin that doctors are all too eager to prescribe to their patients for $300 a pop.
"some doctors still prefer to use"
If your doctor does this, just find a new doctor. There is no good reason to put up with this.
Congratulations. In just a few words, you managed to betray a staggering amount of ignorance with regards to;
1. vitamins or their "development"
2. socialism
3. life expectancy in "socialist" countries (hint: it's higher and increasing) such as Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia, compared to USA (hint: it's lower and decreasing).
4. health care costs in "socialist" countries such as Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia, compared to USA.
I suppose we can only blame the - equally - sorry state of education in the USA.
Artificially expensive niacin is still better than statins, another cholesterol-lowering drug that is expensive and toxic for muscles (yes, heart included, that is the funny point)
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.
There are plenty of foods that can give you the necessary vitamins. Eat some veggies and a reasonable amount of real beef/chicken or other fatty foods and balance it out in your diet with good amounts of other vegetables and fruits so it will be taken up by your body. Drink some wine and beer while you're at it too, within reason, you can get all this food and more within 15 minutes for a family of 4 with less what you'll spend for a single person at McDonalds.
Taking vitamin supplements is generally a waste since you're taking in more than your body needs, so most of it is simply excreted and your body needs other chemicals to even absorb them properly.
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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.
Tell that to the Colleges and Universities that actually perform most biotech research, largely backed by taxpayer funds. Socialize costs and privatize profits now that's good old American capitalist ingenuity for you
Holy shit! Godwin's law AND Poe's law rolled into one comment!
You win my Internet today!
Goverment regulations cause this problem. Now that we are getting rid of NObamacare, this problem will go away. GUARANTEED.
This new administration could have been an opportunity to bring open-market forces to medicine. But so far, I see no indication of this happening. If anything, the swamp is getting deeper.
These idiot pharmaceutical companies are just going to bring massive government regulation down on their heads by pulling this shit for short-term gains .
These "idiots" specifically target Medicare which is forbidden by law from doing cost/benefit analysis or from negotiating costs, which means that 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.
This of course is by design, Big Pharma spends a lot of money on lobbyists and campaign contributions to keep the gravy train rolling
Ever heard of Bayer ? Or Merck (I am speaking of the german one, not the US one It was a german company before the nationalization of 1915) one of the biggest pharmaceutical company ? And yes it does research all over the world, include Darmstadt near where I live. Whoever modded you insightful has no fucking clue and just acted out of the stupid US ideology that the word socialism is bad and an insult, when in reality the US practice some form of socialism, they jsut don't recognize it.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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visit randi.org
The Martin Shkreli case is about a 70-80 year old drug that was "re-monopolized" under FDA regulations, raising its price over 10,000x. The basic patents are looooong expired. The FDA is not a solution, it is a huge source of the problems - Uncle Sam the Monopoly Man, ya know!
... 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
Socialism is an easy fix for cases like this.
Socialism is not an easy fix for cases like this. Socialism caused this case. Namely, it was caused by socialising the cost of inventions by a) granting a government-created monopoly to the inventors of this vitamin and b) creating a government bureaucracy with the power to test medicine for safety and efficacy,
In a socialist system this vitamin wouldn't even be available because it never would have been developed in the first place.
The parts of that claim that are not vague are false.
~Loyal
I aim to misbehave.
... 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. . . .
***BE VERY CAREFUL*** !!!
There is Niacinamide and then there is Nicotinic Acid
Nicotinic acid is preferred in the treatment of high cholesterol levels while niacinamide is not preferred in this treatment. This is because since niacinamide is a derivative of niacin, the cholesterol lowering properties in niacinamide are inhibited
Nicotinic acid is also preferred in treating circulatory problems because of its effects on the blood vessels and the role it plays in lowering high cholesterol levels hence preventing hardening of the arteries
On the other hand, high Nicotinic acid doses can cause flushing a condition that causes blood vessels to widen
This makes the capillaries under the skin to expand to allow more blood to flow making the skin to become red and itchy
Niacinamide does not have the effect of skin flushing and that is why it is preferred over niacin in the treatment of pellagra, a condition that results due to lack of vitamin B3
The current approach to "draining the swamp" is to hire the alligators or appoint them to cabinet positions.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
You are an idiot.
In European countries etc. you are supposed to get drugs by a prescription. Not by "buying them cheap" in a drug store.
Of course they are available ... but not for "sale" to medicate a kid with out professional supervision, moron.
In Asia, I pay 2 cents per pill for an "obsolete drug" that stops some common forms of cancer metastasis but is unadvertised
Care to name that drug, so the rest of the world can survive cancer metastasises, too?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Doctor's prefer this because you don't always know what you're getting when you buy OTC vitamins. They're largely unregulated. When you buy prescription vitamins you know exactly what you're getting because they're now fully regulated by the FDA. Source: I've had close family members with cancer who've been prescribed vitamins.
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It was discovered in 1873 at a public university.
I'm really flabbergasted at the trolls on this story. I mean for fucks sake, how do you imply capitalism was responsible for vitamins being "developed?"
Fanatically anti-fanatical
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
Looks like there is competition at $5 online. So this is a non story.
Where is this FDB approved Niacin supplement available online?
Doctors prescribe the prescription version when a person's health is on the line since they can be assured that it contains the labeled amount of Niacin, while OTC products are not well regulated and can contain varying amounts of the vitamins as well as other fillers.
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.
Any why is that I wonder? An obsolete miracle drug that stops the spread of common forms of cancer, it is cheap to make, and nobody outside Asia makes it or uses it... Doesn't that sound a little fishy to you? At what point does your bullshit detector go off? Asian 'medicine' is notorious for all sorts of worthless quack treatments and the FDA was created to keep useless, dangerous, and addictive medicine away from people. They aren't perfect, but they do a pretty good job of that.
If you have a real condition that is treated by this 'medicine', I am happy for you and I wish you a long life. But you should really read what you wrote and think carefully about why the entire rest of the world isn't using this miracle drug.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Ya, I'm aware there's more to the expense than the co-pay - I forgot to include that, and the part paid by insurance obviously varies - but the total price paid is negotiated by the drug maker and insurance company and is less than the raw list price -- though our co-pays are often based on that list price. I was simply using the BS/BS and Optima co-pays as references that probably reflect, to some extent, the total negotiated price paid by the insurer.
Thanks.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
"two large randomized controlled trials of niacin, AIM-HIGH and HPS2-THRIVE, have shown that despite its effects on HDL-C, niacin does not decrease the incidence of cardiovascular events and may have significant adverse effects."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...
I'm currently living in the United Kingdom. Within five minutes' walk of my home are three places - one pharmacy and two shops - where I can buy vitamins, with no prescription.
They also sell prescription strength ones for which you do need a prescription. If you get low on Vit-D it's not all that unusual to get prescribed some.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Eat Vegemite.
Now what do I do about the continuous vomiting?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
My, my, are you STUPID. The company wouldnt be rising prices if they knew they couldnt get away with it
Not only that, demand will go up because people will demand the "$300 good stuff" not the "$5 garbage".
No sig today...
Capitalism is by nature unethical. Its entire premise is that people are naturally unethical and it relies on competition to drive unethical practices out and leave only the best of the best.
But in order to do that, capitalist theory relies on:
a) competition existing.
b) consumers being informed.
Neither of those things exist in many markets. In the specific case of patented drugs, the patent explicitly blocks competition so (a) is immediately off the table.
Luckily, most people are not actually naturally unethical. The reason this kind of thing didn't happen 10 or 20 or 100 years ago is based purely on there not having been a Martin Shkreli with the balls to publicly announce that they were going to let a bunch of people die in order to increase their bottom line a little bit and dare the government to stop them (which would require new legislation since Shkreli and now this asshat are perfectly within their rights, under current US law, to charge whatever the hell they want for their products no matter how immoral it is.)
Now that Shkreli did what he did and got away with it (remember he was arrested for securities fraud not for letting innocent people suffer and die,) we're likely to see more and more patent owners come out and jack their prices through the roof just because they can. Probably not the big manufacturers (too much risk that the US government would change their mind about imposing pricing caps) but plenty of people like these guys who can get their hands on a patent or two for whatever high-demand drug certainly will.
It is a story because most doctors in the U.S. prescribe medicines by brand name. If the prescription forbids substitutions (a decision that was possibly made with the assumption that there isn’t much cost difference between generic and branded versions), or if if the brand name manufacturer had introduced any subtle change in the formula or presentation (for example, dosage of 295 mg instead of 300 mg, such that no perfectly identical generic will be found), the pharmacy will deliver the branded version, no questions asked. The patient will pay their ten dollar co-pay and the insurance will be billed the rest. Nobody will notice anything. And the following year, everybody’s health insurance premiums will go up by another insane percentage, as usual.
There is no real competition in pharmaceuticals because nobody (prescribers, patients, government) cares about the cost of medicines (or treatment, for that matter), except insurance companies (who secretly negotiate what they pay) and, regrettably, patients who are not insured enough to cover the cost of what they need (and those, as we all know too well, have zero influence).
This may have been a decent argument in 1760 when nearly the entirety of human knowledge could be summarized in a few dozen volumes and a well-read person could be expected to have a reasonably good grasp of most fields of scientific research of the time.
In 2017 when English Wikipedia alone has over 5 million articles. If you take that as a roughly equivalent summary as with the above, that would take thousands upon thousands of volumes.
Basically, there's just no way a person can be expected to know everything about everything anymore. In addition to our lives being generally busier and thus less time to study even the things we care to.
I mean there's definitely a line to be drawn. If you come in with a sore ankle and the doctor wants to xray your chest, most people should be expected to call bullshit. Asking them if there's an OTC alternative to a medication is probably within a reasonable expectation as well (though generally this would be regarded purely as trying to save money rather than an actual detailed inquiry.) Expecting them to ask the doctor for details on each medication though? Even if the doctor was willing to spend the time explaining everything most people wouldn't understand 3/4 of it anyway.
We do place a lot of trust in professionals. That's why we have professionals. If we could be expected to know everything ourselves, we wouldn't have much need for many of the specialized fields that exist. I mean why would you need an oncologist when any old fool should be able to spot cancer on their xray and know which chemo drugs they should take to try and fight it?
Now I know I'm stretching the point quite a bit from "knows enough to ask questions" into the extreme of "knows everything about the field" but the same point stands -- there's just too much shit in the world to know, and not enough time to learn it all. You need to know about your health and your diet and your car and your computer and your politicians and how to inspect a house when you go to buy one or what the contractors are doing if you build it and on and on and on. Certainly each one of those fields is an entire area of study if you want to go in-depth but even just getting a surface level idea of what's going on is a pretty daunting task when you've just gotten home from working a double and want to do nothing more than turn on Netflix and pass out to the Game of Thrones theme song.
Capitalism is by nature unethical.
Only if you contort and narrow the definition of ethics and capitalism to fit a very contrived view point. Capitalism is neither ethical or unethical. A person can be a capitalist and be very ethical or they can be unethical. Capitalism as a philosophy and an economic system is amoral. (which is different from immoral) It is the society around it and the norms of that society that determine whether an action taken is ethical or not.
it relies on competition to drive unethical practices out and leave only the best of the best.
Capitalism has nothing to do with ethical or unethical practices. Never did and never will. That's why we have regulations around capitalism to shape behavior towards ethical practices.
Let's call this sort of thing "The Shkreli Maneuver".
Most vitamins don'r degrade at all.
Care to bet on that? Unless you can store them in a thermally stable environment with no exposure to light, humidity or oxygen there what you just said is demonstrably not true.
Kid: "Hey mom! Look at this! This Himalaya salt has a 'best consume before 2022' date! It must be really good!"
Salt is not a vitamin.
Cancer is a bastard. Sorry for your loss.
But yeah, the list prices are outright blackmail. They'll charge as much as they can get away with or they damage your health. What is costs them to produce is irrelevant. You want to make an immediate impact on the price of medical care? Make drug and medical service discounts illegal. If insurance companies have to pay the same price as non-insured patients, costs will drop precipitously and immediately.
Oh and all those people out there who think medical companies should be non-profits? That does nothing... They still ridiculously overcharge and convert the extra cash into lavish buildings, equipment, and salaries for executives.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
Thanks to wonderful Utah Senator Orrin Hatch(R)
I feel sorry for people that don't drink, because when they get up in the morning, that's as good as they're gonna feel
I bought the powder! That stuff is super cheap in powder form and isn't that slow release namby-pamby crap, FEEL THE BURN! I'm not immune the to "Niacin Sunburn", but I rarely get it anymore. If I happen to be a little dehydrated or I drink the stuff too fast I still get one, but if my wife picks up the cup I've been drinking from and just sips it BURN!!!
I bought this over a year ago and I'm still using the same canister (I should take it more regularly, I've gotten lazy about getting a morning drink together).
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