UK Pharmaceutical Firm Fined For Hiking Drug Price 6,000% (theguardian.com) 182
Slashdot reader Bruce66423 shares a report from the Guardian:
The UK's competition watchdog has imposed fines of more than £100m on the pharmaceutical company Advanz and its former private equity owners after it was found to have inflated the price of its thyroid tablets by up to 6,000%. An investigation by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) found that the private-equity backed pharmaceutical company charged "excessive and unfair prices" for liothyronine tablets, which are used to treat thyroid hormone deficiency.
Advanz took advantage of limited competition in the market from 2007 to bring in sustained price hikes for the drug, often used by patients with depression and fatigue, of more than 6,000% in the space of 10 years, according to the investigation. The CMA said that between 2007 and 2017, the price paid by the National Health Service for liothyronine tablets rose from £4.46 to £258.19, a rise of almost 6,000%, while production costs remained broadly stable... Dr Andrea Coscelli, the CMA's chief executive, said: "Advanz's decision to ratchet up the price of liothyronine tablets and impose excessive and unfair prices for over eight years came at a huge cost to the NHS, and ultimately to UK taxpayers.
"But that wasn't all. It also meant that people dealing with depression and extreme fatigue, as a result of their thyroid conditions, were told they could not continue to receive the most effective treatment for them due its increased price."
Advanz took advantage of limited competition in the market from 2007 to bring in sustained price hikes for the drug, often used by patients with depression and fatigue, of more than 6,000% in the space of 10 years, according to the investigation. The CMA said that between 2007 and 2017, the price paid by the National Health Service for liothyronine tablets rose from £4.46 to £258.19, a rise of almost 6,000%, while production costs remained broadly stable... Dr Andrea Coscelli, the CMA's chief executive, said: "Advanz's decision to ratchet up the price of liothyronine tablets and impose excessive and unfair prices for over eight years came at a huge cost to the NHS, and ultimately to UK taxpayers.
"But that wasn't all. It also meant that people dealing with depression and extreme fatigue, as a result of their thyroid conditions, were told they could not continue to receive the most effective treatment for them due its increased price."
A fine of three times the profit made (Score:5, Insightful)
The spectacular feature here is that the fine is a multiple of illegal profit. Let's look forward to the day when that level of fine is imposed on other monopolists.
Re: A fine of three times the profit made (Score:2)
Lets see if this sticks, or they renegotiate or appeal or what ever into oblivion
Re: A fine of three times the profit made (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: A fine of three times the profit made (Score:5, Insightful)
Rather than fine their profit (which the company is entitled to), why dont they instead revoke the covered patents?
Liothyronine has been in use since the mid 1950's, and commercially sold in the USA since at least 1960.
Assuming this stuff even is still under patent protection today (another huge problem that also needs fixed, but that's another topic) there are in fact generics available as well as the same chemical made by other companies in other countries.
That the NHS refused to cover the cost of this drug unless purchased from this one firm that does not in fact have monopoly rights is where you should be looking if you want to fix the problem.
To be honest, there is so much undue corruption in the pharmaceutical industry that one could no doubt fix both of the above major problems and still not have a system any less disfunctional.
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Levothyroxine is another and it's practically dirt cheap even without insurance.
Re: A fine of three times the profit made (Score:5, Informative)
Re: A fine of three times the profit made (Score:5, Informative)
To sell medicine in the UK you have to be registered with the government for regulatory purposes. Every medicine they make has to be registered too, meet UK standards and be subjected to testing.
Registering costs money and requires them to have a UK base of operations. It's even less worth bothering with post-brexit because it's only good for the UK, not the whole of the EU.
So in this case there was no other source. I suppose they could have pleaded with some other company or offered to pay the registration costs, but since it's illegal to price gouge the NHS anyway they just fined them.
BTW, PROTIP: Because every medicine has to have a registration number on the box you can tell when two are the same because the number is the same. For example some Neurophen ibuprofen tablets marketed as "for headaches" or "for period pain" are actually exactly the same as the cheaper generic Neurophen. Same tablet, different box. They are even shared between brands, e.g. Boot's long lasting ibuprofen for £4 or get exactly the same product with Home Bargains branding for £1.
Re: A fine of three times the profit made (Score:2)
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The patents had expired, generic versions could be made... But nobody made them. This company noticed and jacked up the price.
Re: A fine of three times the profit made (Score:2)
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Wow, fragile capitalists find this to be "flamebait". If your economic theory is that weak that even questioning it enrages you and you feel the need to downmod instead of posting a reply... Well maybe it's not so great after all.
Re: A fine of three times the profit made (Score:2)
There are generics in the US, so I doubt the patent is still in effect.
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Re: A fine of three times the profit made (Score:4, Interesting)
Why did NHS ignore nearly ten years of price increases without questioning it? Yes, the pharmacy was bad for raising prices, but NHS rode those price increases year after year without question or oversight. I want to hear about the NHS workers that ignored the issue for years.
Re: A fine of three times the profit made (Score:3)
And what of the NHS workers that year after year approved the price increases?
Imprison Those Responsible (Score:5, Insightful)
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individuals responsible for raising the prices are held criminally liable as individuals and face time in prison as well as personal fines.
The legal framework for that would be impossible to navigate as a result of effects like this never being the result of one person. Additionally it wouldn't change anything. These actions are the result of a corporate culture, not the result of individuals. Individuals shape their decision making by corporate culture in which they find themselves.
If you want to resolve this it's not a few individuals you need to target, but rather go directly after the company leadership.
Re: Imprison Those Responsible (Score:2)
The easy answer would have been for NHS to source the drug elsewhere, but it choose not to. Or challenge the price increases year after year for the same compound, but they didn't. At some point doesn't NHS bear some responsibility for letting this go on for up to ten years?
Re:Imprison Those Responsible (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: Imprison Those Responsible (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: Imprison Those Responsible (Score:4, Informative)
What patents? The word 'patent' does not show up in the linked article.
According to wikipedia, liothyronine was first approved for medical use in 1956: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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If you want criminal liability, the company should be able to go to the government and say, "Is this price legal or not?"
Too many governments say, "We'll wait to see the effect then decide whether yoi're being illegal or not.
That's not how it is supposed to work. If something is illegal, you should be able to ask government if a specific action is illegal or not before you do it.
Anything else is good old lords and kings deciding to jail you after the fact.
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The UK is common law like America. This means that ultimately the courts decide on the law, usually based on statutes that the legislature has passed.
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There is potential liability in the UK. If you take some action which you know could hurt someone without a damn good reason you can be held liable. "I wanted another yacht" is not a good reason.
BTW the patents on this stuff expired decades ago, it's just that only one manufacturer is supplying it to the UK.
Re: Imprison Those Responsible (Score:3)
What patent? There are generics available from King Pharmaceuticals, NHS blindly accepted the price increases year after year and never investigated generic options. At some point NHS is at least partly at fault.
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If they cause suffering and even death due to people not being able to afford or get the medication they need then....
This is Britain. The cost is paid by the National Health Service, so no, individual people are not "unable to afford the medication."
That's in the summary, if you scroll down a bit. The accusation is that the company "impose excessive and unfair prices for over eight years came at a huge cost to the NHS, and ultimately to UK taxpayers."
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Yknow what else is in the summary? Explicitly discussing how patients had their treatments discontinued due to the cost.
Re: Imprison Those Responsible (Score:2)
Single player means a single entity decides who gets what treatment. In some cases, treatment is denied based on cost, or on scarcity (lack of doctors, facilities, etc). In this case NHS kept accepting price increases for years without question, when cheaper generics were available elsewhere (for example, King Pharma in the US), why is no one looking into that?
I am a capitalism advocate (Score:4, Insightful)
...mainly because as fallible as the system may be, so far it seems to have produced to best overall quality of life on the planet.
As with any system, letting it do it's thing uncontrolled, leads to bullshit.
I understand that pharmaceutical companies need a bit of protection to recoup their R&D otherwise nobody would invest into R&D on this level.
In Switzerland, we have a government organisation called Swissmedic that determines acceptable market prices. They calculate the projected customer base together with the R&D and determine the price any given product is allowed to have.
Granted, this is not beyond reproach... Swissmedic is also tasked with overseeing whether a substance actually works or has side effects. Remember Tamiflu and how we found out it does nothing against swine flu? Yeah, Swissmedic was tasked with making sure this does not happen. Their excuse was something along the lines of they're using the producers own studies and only theirs, to determine whether a new substance works.
If you smell potential if not outright corruption there you're not alone.
In conclusion: We're a complex species living in a complex environment... there is no easy solution to keep things running smoothly. Any simple solution will create other problems. And any complex solution creates, well, complexity...
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Sadly, that isn't what we have right now.
Re:I am a capitalism advocate (Score:4, Insightful)
It's worth noting that regulating capitalism is hard. I don't mean, it's hard to get regulation in place, or hard to get people and policy makers on board, which it is.
I mean that everything in this giant system has weird knock-on effects and it feels so easy to create perverse incentives. It feels like (and I might be wrong in this, IANA economist) for every "common sense solution" the man in the street comes up with, there is some unwanted side effect somewhere that makes things worse for everybody.
Re: I am a capitalism advocate (Score:3)
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Patents coerce new drugs into existence. You want this, or you are in the same mass murder category as (Godwin alert).
In fact any policy that decreases rate of invention kills more than it saves, no matter how many poor people get currently existing stuff for free.
It's the same thing as compound interest. It wins out in the end as tech lags years, then decades behind where it otherwise would be.
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In this case, there are no patents. The problem is that without sufficient and vigilant regulation, some profiteers are just too skilled at nailing the invisible hand to a tree.
Re: I am a capitalism advocate (Score:2)
The drug is, and has been, off most ent for years - NHS chose to stick with this supplier, accepting the price increases without question for a decade before pushing back...
NHS failed to notice it had generic options and just accepted the increases without question.
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In the US medicare decided to have a price it would pay for insulin testers and test strips. All of a sudden drug companies whipped out new units, each with its own test strip system.
Hoo boy! A new teat to suck on, nevermind cheaper systems already. But the patient isn't the market, the market is lobbiests stroking the medicare officials.
In your case, announce a reasonable price, and other companies will satisfy it. If the expensive company miraculously produces cheap product to undercut even that, thro
Re:I am a capitalism advocate (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: I am a capitalism advocate (Score:2, Informative)
Re: I am a capitalism advocate (Score:4, Insightful)
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The U.S. is far from the sole source of medical innovation.
Re: I am a capitalism advocate (Score:2)
No one said "sole source"
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You mean decreased government intervention leads to market consolation with less productivity and less supply demand balance, at least with competent government intervention. Of course if you put the billionaires in charge of the government intervention, you get a shit show.
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with some of the highest standards of living & quality of life in countries that have large govt owned sectors & strongly socialist policies.
This all depends on how you look at things. I can't think of one OECD country that doesn't depend on extremes outside their jurisdiction to acquire these benefits. They rely on the slave labor of developing countries and use the products developed from mainly capitalist countries. When others do the dirty work it's easy to sit back and enjoy the rewards.
The truth is our systems take generations to produce the results or damages caused by our policies. Most of our systems rely on secrecy to reward a few at t
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You're conflating social welfare policies and capitalism as it was explicitly described by foundational authors such as Paine with a fraudulent misrepresentation of "socialism". There is no country on the face of the earth with even basic human rights where the government has seized all means of production and abolished the right to own property and do with it what you wish. There never has been, there never will be.
What you're describing are capitalist countries. Many of which lived directly on the border
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And you're conflating State Communism with socialism.
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>"I am a capitalism advocate[...] As with any system, letting it do it's thing uncontrolled, leads to bullshit.[...] In Switzerland, we have a government organisation called Swissmedic that determines acceptable market prices."
Just pointing out that such a scheme, one that controls (sets) prices on a whole market, including those NOT covered by patents and WITH competition present, is far from being "capitalism" or a free market.
I am pro-limited-regulation for those individual companies/products with gov
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People should quit blaming capitalism for problems with crony capitalism. The problem is their willing cronies in government, not the capitalism.
We'll skip for now the observation based on history that the cronies in government went into government to become cronies, using helping the people as a facetious cover story.
Re: I am a capitalism advocate (Score:2)
Is the issue that, in a world with lower noticed generic options for the same drug a pharmacy company raised its prices, or that NHS, ignorant of generic options for the same drug, kept paying the ever-increasing prices one supplier requested?
A fair defense of the fine against the fine is that its not their fault NHS didn't realize King Pharmaceuticals offered a lowered pet generic version.
Many comments here assume the drug was under patent protection, so NHS was forced to pay these inflated prices - that's
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Doesn't Switzerland have the 2nd highest drug prices in the world? Sounds like a case of regulatory failure if so.
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Don't think of capitalism as a "system". Think of it as a tool. A system is a complicated thing. It's made up of many pieces working together in complicated ways. Capitalism is one of many tools available to us in designing our system. It's really good for some purposes, really bad for others. Being capitalist isn't automatically good or bad. It's just a tool. Use it where it makes sense and not where it doesn't.
Generic (Score:3)
This is what happens with patents and with no restrictions. Patents are a government-created monopoly powers given to companies/inventors. It is an extremely NECESSARY incentive. Without patents, nobody would develop anything anymore. And some patents have millions (or many millions) of dollars of work behind them. The problem is that with monopoly powers should come some type of oversight during the patent period.
But something strange can happen, even post-patent. One of many examples in the USA: The patent for fluticasone expired a long time ago. It is why the makers of Flonase (nasal use) now have zillions of generic competitors. The drug price went from $150 per month down to about $10 per month. HOWEVER, the same exact drug for HFA/MDI (hand-held inhalers) which is ALSO off-patent, has zero competitors, even YEARS after it went off patent (and that includes the delivery device patents). So that exact same chemical costs $300 per month, when it could/should cost something like $20; affecting millions of people with asthma.
So why is there no generic company making/selling it here? Nobody seems to know. If shady, you can buy it from India for $15, complete with shipping. Just a little research, and I found several other cases of the same thing.
I think that once off-patent, if no generic becomes available to the local market in X months, patients should be allowed to legally buy it directly from other countries (with prescription) until native competition occurs. If the thought of foreign-made medications seems scary, it probably shouldn't (depending on the company). A ton of what gets filled by pharmacies in the USA is already made in India, Israel, UK, etc.
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Without patents, nobody would develop anything anymore.
The fashion industry doesn't have copyright or patents, except for their brand identities. Can you please explain how or why they develop, innovate & create?
Re:Generic (Score:5, Informative)
>"The fashion industry doesn't have copyright or patents, except for their brand identities. Can you please explain how or why they develop, innovate & create?"
1) There is hardly any cost involved with "fashion" development, compared to something like drugs.
2) The development cycle of "fashion" is extremely fast compared to drugs, microprocessors, electronics, engines, etc, etc. They can reap the benefits of their designs immediately and then come out with something new to replace it long before copies matter much.
3) The fashion industry has protection through copyright.
I will also point out that "fashion" doesn't really contribute much of anything actually very useful to society. At least not compared to building, transportation, computation, energy, health, productivity, entertainment, education, nutrition, etc, etc. "Style", itself, isn't invention, and thus isn't patentable.
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>"Clearly patents are causing harm to a lot of sectors & are often used anti-competitively."
Harm, in some ways, absolutely. And by definition, a patent is anti-competitive (that is the whole point of it).
>"During the millennia before patents were a thing, people innovated, developed & created regardless. "
They also didn't have markets that required millions of dollars of development for a single complex product, either. In simpler times, things were simpler. Also, in ancient times, they wou
Re:Generic (Score:5, Informative)
This is what happens with patents and with no restrictions./p>
This story is not about patents which the UK has been respecting and pays for. This is more normal cartel style / illegal monopoly type behaviour. The drugs were generic but the company persuaded competitors not to enter their market in return for consideration. Both things are obviously bad, however patents are a clear trade off decision with a clear time limit and so, in principle, have more of a justification than this.
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>"This story is not about patents which the UK has been respecting and pays for. This is more normal cartel style / illegal monopoly type behaviour. The drugs were generic but the company persuaded competitors not to enter their market in return for consideration."
I agree. That is why I used the USA fluticasone HFA example. If there is a huge demand for it (which there is) and it is off patent (which it is) and there are generic makers out there (which there are), then what is preventing a generic Flov
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One possibility is that it costs lots of money for a generics manufacturer to tool up to make the generic, with a good possibility that the original manufacturer will drop its price making it impossible to recover the money spent on tooling up. A gamble that others won't take.
With limited competition there is often the "cartel-style" thing where the competitors, instead of competing to lower prices, follow each others lead in raising prices. As there is no conspiracy, it isn't actually a cartel but has the
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>"One possibility is that it costs lots of money for a generics manufacturer to tool up to make the generic"
One might think so.... if they weren't already making the exact same chemical for the nose spray version already made by many other companies. :) It might be a different form or something, but it is hard to believe it would matter that much.
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Companies will buy out the generic makers sometimes, to shut them down. Sometimes generic makers spring up for the purpose of getting bought out, like apartments miraculously spring up in the proposed path of a new highway, and similar empty factories are suddenly filled with unused equipment.
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Until Disney literally bribed congress to change things patents and copyrights were astronomically shorter than they are today. Your argument fails based on our own history.
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>"Until Disney literally bribed congress to change things patents and copyrights were astronomically shorter than they are today.
Cronyism in action.
>"Your argument fails based on our own history."
What argument? I didn't say that business wasn't going to corrupt government. In fact, I would say that it can and does. The solution to cronyism certainly isn't socialism. It is awareness and accountability. The lack of absolute media control over the news is very helpful now. Consumers/voters are more
Re: Generic (Score:2)
The drug is off most ent, it was off patent for years, NHS dropped the ball and failed to realize it, wasting tens of millions of euros, and now they want to blame the seller for their failure.
Imagine NHS was a driver and they always bought there gas at a particular gas station every time, paying whatever the station asked for without question or challenge, as much as $10/gallon, never realizing that around the corner is another gas station that sells it for $2-3/gallon, as the market fluctuated. Once the d
Void the patent (Score:4, Interesting)
Pull this shit, lose your patent. That should make management think twice.
Hold Management to Account (Score:2)
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That's not necessarily true, Shkrelli was around when the increases came to light. The board will still be in place, and have a longer term view than the CEO's golden parachute.
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Pull this shit, lose your patent. That should make management think twice.
Yes but also keep the fine. Simply pulling the patent would be seen as a cost of business otherwise.
Re: Void the patent (Score:2)
It is off patent already.
Bastards (Score:2)
Not a new problem (Score:5, Informative)
Epipens now cost $700 for 2 doses. Insulin now costs approximately $300 for a bottle.
I can walk through the insulin problem. Dr. Banting made the patent public domain when he discovered it, to help the world. It takes processing of animal fetuses to harvest in bulk, and the price dropped for decades until it was roughly $20 for a bottle that lasted nearly a month for someone small back in the 1970's. It came from slaughterhouses: especially from old milk cows with unborn calves. There were some allergy issues, almost entirely from impurities. Refining it for absolute purity wastes valuable insulin, and takes time and money, though insulin is relatively easy to refine with modern tools: patents had been developed on how to refine it effectively, cheaply, and safely. But the patents were expiring.
So, *voila*. Human insulin was engineered, with new matents, at more than 20 times the cost, and an incredibly effective marketing campaign championing human insulin was launched. Beef and pork insulin were shut down by monopoly abuse, pharmacies could not *get* human insulin if they carried beef insulin. And the human insulin frankly blows: it has a somewhat shorter response that is irrelevant, 15 minutes versus 20 minutes really doesn't matter, and there were fast-acting types of beef and pork available, it doesn't last as long as beef, which means it can't do the "one shot a day" for diabetics who still make some insulin, and it causes hypoglycemic unawareness. That damn near *killed* me, I had to give up ever driving to work again because the risk of a dropping blood behind the wheel was far too high.
My diabetes now also costs not only more for the insulin, but for the far more frequent blood tests, and the continuous glucose sensors, and the insulin pump to manage my blood sugar at night. The continuous sensors don't save money on est strips, they require frequent calibration tests at $1/test strip. Altogether, this costs at least 10 times, just for this delivery and glucose tracking, as shots did.
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You can fly from the USA to Germany to buy your insulin and it's cheaper than paying out of pocket.
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Insulin now costs approximately $300 for a bottle.
The entire insurance price structure is designed to hide the real price from the patient.
Walmart has it for $24.99 in R,NPH and 70/30 in a house branded box from Novo Norddisk. $300 a vial is the US bogeyman price they keep us scared of "losing your insurance." You might have difficulty adjusting to a new mix but its way cheaper. Sounds like your doctor has you on the highest cost treatment plan a type 2 could have, maybe you should get more advice from other doctors. Having a pump for type 2 is like "ex
Re: Not a new problem (Score:2)
Epipens now cost $700 for 2 doses. Insulin now costs approximately $300 for a bottle.
Insulin is available as a generic, you pay those prices because you insist on the convenience their 'name brand' manufacturer offers or you specifically need the slightly different non scene rid version.
The prices will drop when buyers refuse to pay the higher prices - and based on this story, single-payer healthcare systems gave some issues dealing with purchasing.
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There are older mrna insulins out of patent, something on the order of $25 a vial (compared to three pens as equivalent, for hundreds of dollars, most of that pen.
The idea it is either pig insulin or expensive patent artificial insulin, in a pen at that, is no longer accurate.
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Sorry, rDNA.
What's important to keep in mind... (Score:2)
Self-Perpetuating Problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Because Advanz is a corporation, they get to deduct all their legitimate operating expenses from their income before they have to calculate the tax they owe the government. "R&D" is considered a legitimate operating expense.
So what is to stop any company from claiming an excessive R&D spend, writing that off against their tax liabilities, and then paying less tax?
The safeguard against this, of course, comes in the form of a Tax Audit. But you'll note that, as per the Guardian article, it wasn't the UK's tax authority that spotted the wrong-doing, but the UK's Competition & Markets Authority, their competition regulator.
There's another interesting piece in the Guardian article, which notes:-
"The company was originally two separate entities, Mercury Pharma Group and Amdipharm. London-based private equity group Hg Capital bought Mercury for £179m in 2009 and sold it to fellow buyout house Cinven for £465m in 2012. Cinven had bought family-owned niche pharmaceuticals business Amdipharm that same year, for £367m, and subsequently merged the two businesses.
In 2015, Cinven sold the combined entity to Concordia Healthcare, a Canadian company listed on the Toronto stock exchange, in a £2.3bn deal."
So let's get this right....
1. In 2009, "Mercury", one of the two ancestor companies, was purchased for £179m.
2. In 2012, it was sold for £465m.
First question: What was this company doing between 2009 and 2012 that saw it's value rise by 160%? Did it bring new drugs to market? Or was this just a case of Hg Capital "flipping" Mercury for an obscene profit?
Second question: Did the buyer, Cinven, have the cash to make the purchase, or did it finance the deal with debt that it attached to Mercury?
3. Cinven went on to purchase another company, Amdipharm, also in 2012. This would value the two combined companies at £832m.
4. Three years later, Cinven sold the combined company to Concordia Healthcare, for £2.3 billion.
Third question: What happened to these two combined companies between 2012 and 2015 that saw their valuations rise by 176% in three years? new products?
Fourth question: If the combined company was really worth £2.3 billion, how come the entire company [that is, the two ancestors - Mercury and Amdipharm - plus the company "Concordia" which made the purchase, was sold 3 years later for £605 million, a paltry 26% of the price that Concordia paid for Mercury and Amdipharm just 3 years previously?
Fifth question: if Concordia was truly worth just £605 million in 2021 when it was sold, what happened to cause it's value to shrink by 75% in just 3 years - when, as the Guardian article shows - it was abusing a monopoly position and making money hand over fist?
Sixth and final question: where the heck was the UK Competition and Markets Authority, or the UK's Revenue/Taxation Service, while all this crap was going down? Asleep?
More and more it seems like if you run a corporation, you can break as many laws as you like, because it's just a matter of probability as to whether or not you get caught... and even if you *do* get caught, it will be the company that pays a fine, while you take your private jet to the Caribbean in order to get on your private yacht and sail off in to the sunset.
It isn't the £100 million fine that matters here. What really matters is to see what the UK Competition and Markets Authority and the UK's Revenue Service do about changing their practices so that companies can't get away with that in future. Unless they make changes, this will just keep on happening...
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Sixth and final question: where the heck was the UK Competition and Markets Authority, or the UK's Revenue/Taxation Service, while all this crap was going down? Asleep?
In a word, regulatory capture. That's capitalism working normally. It's why we (ordinary people) can't have nice things, you know, like functioning democracy.
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Basically they buy a normal company that does a bunch of things, some of them profitable and some of them less so. The company might do that because it wants to be diverse in case one product or business area suffers a downturn, or because it has long-standing customer relations that it thinks have goodwill value, or just because the owners think making important generic drugs people need is a good thing to do.
The equity group comes in and buys it, dumps everything that isn't making big profits. Operating c
Good to see the tides are turning (Score:2)
The Netherlands competition watchdog just fined Leadiant 20million EUR for a similar crime https://nltimes.nl/2021/07/19/... [nltimes.nl]
And Shkreli is rotting in jail the piece of shit that he is, though sadly not for what happened with Daraprim.
The government barred from negotiating drug prices (Score:2)
In December 2003, Medicare Part D was rolled out [nih.gov]. Part D is the drug benefit. It enables the government to pay for drugs for those on Medicare [medicare.gov], which is most seniors. However, it also prevents government, the largest purchaser, from negotiating drug prices. [politifact.com]
So... it is wisdom to charge as much as your risk tolerance will allow, without drawing undue attention to yourself (and even that many have no practical consequence as only a few people follow these issues). The law is intentionally written like this. I'
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That was the one good thing that Trump was trying to do. Let the government negotiate drug prices. You could imagine how poorly that went over with big pharma. Lobbyists went into overtime and killed it. Same with requiring all those prescription commercials to state the out of pocket purchase price.
I'm all for the NASCAR rule when it comes to government. The more lobbyist money you receive the bigger the logo is on your jacket.
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Out of pocket prices aren't the real prices. They are the idiotically high prices used to start negotiations with insurance companies, hospitals, Medicare.
The hockey stick horror stories for uninsured are a side effect of this process.
Incompetent NHS Management (Score:2)
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Once Upon a Time in Shaolin (Score:2)
I think I know who purchased the Wu Tang Clan album "Once Upon a Time in Shaolin" [slashdot.org] from the U.S. govt
Some context on hypothyrodism (Score:5, Interesting)
First, when they say 'extreme fatigue', people who are severely hypothyroid basically don't have a functioning metabolism. They can fall into a kind of coma that's basically just them not having the energy to do anything else. My partner was recently diagnosed with hypothyroidism, and at its worst, she couldn't stand up for more than 5 or 6 minutes at a time, and even sitting at a desk for 20 or 30 minutes made her so tired that she would lie down on the floor to REST. AFTER SITTING. She would fall asleep randomly during the day.
It also causes people to gain a lot of weight, even if they're normally active. If you're working out a lot but find yourself gaining a lot of fat on your body, and you feel tired and cold a lot, you might have a thyroid issue.
Okay, so liothyronine is a replacement for a hormone that's commonly referred to as T3. T3 is something your body creates from T4, the other active thyroid hormone. Together, they basically make your metabolism work. T4 can work on your cells directly, or be converted to T3. T3 is about 3-4x as potent as T4, but makes up only 10% of what's circulating in your blood.
If you have a problem converting T4 to T3 (you either don't convert at all, or you convert T4 to reverse-T3, a hormone that binds to the same sites as T3 but is functionally inert), you can experience a lot of hypothyroidism symptoms. But T3 has a very short half-life, so people that are on T3 replacement therapy take multiple doses a day to make sure their hormone levels don't crash and they have energy throughout the day.
So basically, this company raised the price of a medication that is the only thing that lets some people lead a normal life, and which needs to be taken between 2 and 7 times a day depending on how severe your condition is. Bad hypothyroidism is like death in slow motion. You can't do anything, sleep isn't restful, you can't exercise, you get fat. It's just a miserable way to live. Being diagnosed and having a doctor take you seriously is surprisingly hard (especially if you've reached the stage where you're fat; many doctors will tell you to stop being fat as a solution. But if you can't exercise because of fatigue and you don't burn calories because your metabolism is stunted, how does that work?), and being prescribed T3 is even harder. T4 monotherapy is the most common treatment, but it doesn't work if you're bad at converting T4 to T3. (They don't generally test for that circumstance, or even measure T3/rT3 levels in the blood at all. Most hypothyroidism is diagnosed on the basis of TSH, a hormone that comes from the pituitary gland with dubious diagnostic worth, based on emerging research.)
Anyway, to jack up the prices like this is unconscionable. The amount of suffering that the patients went through to just get the diagnosis, let alone the prescription was likely enormous. To then make the drug so expensive is just heaping misery onto people that really don't deserve it.
It's in their genes (Score:2)
Don't drug dealers' prices always go up after they get users hooked?
Re: (Score:3)
Or we could toss a Republican in the ring with the Truth and watch them wither: Ach, s s s s s s, n o o o o. . .it burns poor Smeagol.
Re: (Score:2)
Didn't know R Truth was that acidic.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Didn't know R Truth was that acidic.
There is no Republican truth, just a crude form of truthiness [wikipedia.org].
Re:"The Beating of a Liberal" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: "The Beating of a Liberal" (Score:4, Insightful)
And what if the marines are liberals?
Maybe they just masturbate at that point.
If conservatives don't... well that does explain a lot actually, god damn.
Re: (Score:3)
Oh, man.
Re: (Score:2)
That's a good guy. The really rotten ones plan to buy out, or threaten to crush via competition (so don't bother trying) any generic manufacturer who springs up.
Sometimes they spring up for the purpose of getting bought out.