The staggering increase in prescription drug costs can only make one wonder if one day..... only the wealthy "elite" will be able to afford to live longer.
Prices for brand-name drugs for diseases such as diabetes, multiple sclerosis, cancer, and arthritis are soaring, a survey for Bloomberg News by data provider DRX found. Analysts, meanwhile, predict the first $1 million drug treatment may be just around the corner. The analysis of big-selling drugs found that price increases in the United States have far outpaced inflation since late 2007 for many drug categories. Here are 73 drug brands whose U.S. prices for at least one dosage increased 75 percent or more in the period.
Earl Harford, a retired professor, recently bought a month’s worth of the pills he needs to keep his leukemia at bay. The cost: $7,676, or three times more than when he first began taking the pills in 2001. Over the years, he has paid more than $140,000 from his retirement savings to cover his share of the drug’s price. “They haven’t improved the drug; they haven’t done anything but keep manufacturing it. How do they justify it?”
While the consumer price index rose just 12 percent in the period, one diabetes drug quadrupled in price and another rose by 160%, according to the analysis by Los-Angeles based DRX, a provider of comparison software for health plans.
The recent wave of acquisitions may push prices even higher, suggests Robert Kemp, an economist at the University of Louisiana at Monroe. The more drugs a company has in a specific therapeutic area, he said, the more ability it may have to maintain higher prices when negotiating with payers.
Fewer competitors = more market share = ability to demand higher prices.
How drug companies price medicines “is one of the industry’s dirty secrets,” said Bernard Munos, a former Eli Lilly executive who founded InnoThink Center for Research in Biomedical Innovation, an Indianapolis consulting firm. “Everyone is engaging in extreme prices because they can get away with it.”
Medicine in the next century? Be able to afford it or rest in peace?
Full story at Bloomberg
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