{"id":61820,"date":"2015-12-02T00:01:09","date_gmt":"2015-12-02T05:01:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/?p=61820"},"modified":"2015-12-02T13:01:25","modified_gmt":"2015-12-02T18:01:25","slug":"medical-commodities-market","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2015\/12\/02\/medical-commodities-market\/","title":{"rendered":"medical commodities market…"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A cold rainy day here in the Georgia Mountains – home from a long Thanksgiving holiday trip. I was sort of buzzing by the web sites I missed last week, and I couldn’t help but notice that the topic of drug costs was far and away the dominant topic. It was already on my mind. If you’re a doctor, you get used to medical questions, but on this trip, it was all about the cost of medications, from both young and old. I’ve tried not to get caught up in that issue here – the odd comment about Martin Shkreli or Solvaldi, but otherwise I haven’t seen much reason to join the chorus. Decrying price gouging doesn’t need much more of a voice – there are plenty around already. <\/p>\n

But thumbing through the blogs and news today, I kind of changed my mind. Here are three recent blurbs from Ed Silverman’s Pharmalot – companies who were clearly way over the line with their pricing. As an aside, they share something else kind of encouraging. In each case, somebody’s fighting back!…<\/div>\n
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Express Scripts to cover low-cost alternative to $750 Turing drug<\/a><\/div>\n
Pharmalot<\/font><\/strong><\/div>\n
By Ed Silverman<\/div>\n
December 1, 2015<\/div>\n

Martin Shkreli faces a new hurdle selling his decades-old anti-infective pill for $750. Express Scripts, the nation’s largest pharmacy benefits manager, will cover a new compounded version that costs just $1 a tablet. Moreover, two leading physicians’ groups quickly endorsed the move, suggesting that Shkreli’s Turing<\/font><\/strong> Pharmaceuticals will encounter substantial — and unexpected — competition.<\/p>\n

“This will solve a big point of pain in health care costs,” said Dr. Steve Miller, the chief medical officer at Express Scripts. The decision comes amid ongoing controversy over Daraprim, which Turing<\/font><\/strong> last summer bought from another company and then boosted the price from $13.55 a pill to $750, a 5,000 percent increase. The price hike triggered a new round of scrutiny of pharmaceutical costs and transformed Shkreli — who used social media to deride his critics — into a poster boy for greed and outsized drug pricing…<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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Gilead pricing for Sovaldi hepatitis C drug slammed by senators<\/a><\/div>\n
Pharmalot<\/font><\/strong><\/div>\n
By Ed Silverman<\/div>\n
December 1, 2015<\/div>\n

Gilead<\/font><\/strong> Sciences placed profits before patients in pricing its groundbreaking Sovaldi hepatitis C treatment, according to the results of an 18-month US Senate investigation. The drug maker was aware more patients could have been treated if Sovaldi were priced for less than $1,000 a pill, or $84,000 for a full course of treatment. Instead, it refused to lower the price or offer meaningful discounts in order to maximize and outmaneuver competition, the investigation found. And Gilead<\/font><\/strong> did the same thing with its Harvoni follow-up treatment.<\/p>\n

“The company knew its prices would put treatment out of reach for millions of Americans,” said Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon who, along with Iowa Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, discussed their probe at a media briefing. “If Gilead<\/font><\/strong>’s approach is the future of how blockbuster drugs are launched in America, it’s going to cost billions and billions of dollars to treat just a fraction of patients in America”…<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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Valeant’s unsavory ways a lesson for us all<\/a><\/div>\n
Pharmalot<\/font><\/strong><\/div>\n
By Ed Silverman<\/div>\n
November 1, 2015<\/div>\n

Valeant<\/font><\/strong> CEO J. Michael Pearson is not your typical drug executive. Pearson built his company into a moneymaking machine by acquiring other drug makers and products, not by investing in research and development. The approach contradicted longstanding industry doctrine, but it won high praise from investors. For years, the Canadian drug company’s stock went nowhere but up.<\/p>\n

Not anymore. A slew of questions about its business practices has turned Valeant<\/font><\/strong> from a Wall Street darling into a Main Street poster child for questionable behavior. Federal prosecutors have issued subpoenas. Lawmakers are conducting investigations. Pharmacy benefit managers stopped doing business with a company that was important to Valeant’s<\/font><\/strong> operations…<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
But the reason I picked these three examples is that in each case, the company doing the gouging didn’t develop the drugs. They acquired them.<\/font><\/em> It seems that medications are becoming a commodities market, brokered in a way that’s uncomfortably close to the derivitives [futures] market that took us out in the Great Recession of 2008. Added to that, these medications are often monopolies<\/font><\/em>, in that they’re one-of-a-kind drugs, so the people needing to take them are essentially a captive audience. <\/div>\n

We’ve traditionally given new drugs a period of legal monopoly in return for private enterprise becoming the development arm of medicine. But the pharmaceutical and medical support industries have increasingly come to represent the dark side of capitalism. The three companies mentioned above developed nothing. They got hold of their products and are only looking to reap a big profit. There’s not much else to say. And when I step back and think about it, this issue of the financial bottom line<\/font><\/em> is the ultimate culprit in everything I find myself complaining about in modern medicine – the conflicts of interest, the jury-rigged clinical trials, the distortions of scientific evidence, the corrupted key opinion leaders, the outrageous pricing of drugs, etc. <\/p>\n

It doesn’t seem to me that stop-gap measures aimed at each situation as it arises is what we need right now. This feels like the kind of problem that begs for sweeping system changes, though I have no real clue what those changes might entail. But I do know this – it’s not going to fix itself…<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A cold rainy day here in the Georgia Mountains – home from a long Thanksgiving holiday trip. I was sort of buzzing by the web sites I missed last week, and I couldn’t help but notice that the topic of drug costs was far and away the dominant topic. It was already on my mind. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-61820","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61820","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61820"}],"version-history":[{"count":30,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61820\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":61850,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61820\/revisions\/61850"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61820"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61820"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61820"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}