Blood Pressure Risk Warning: Pharmaceutical pricing "strategies" article

[TygrBright]

You may not want to read this if you are at risk of cardiac events or stroke due to high blood pressure.

Valeant's Drug Price Strategy Enriches it, but Infuriates Patients and Lawmakers

But while more conventional companies do not typically triple or quadruple prices overnight, they do often raise them year after year at a rate far faster than inflation. Big pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer and Merck raised list prices an average of 13 percent in 2014 and 8 percent so far this year, according to Deutsche Bank.

Ronny Gal, a pharmaceutical analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company, said smaller price increases on widely used drugs had a much bigger effect on health care spending than the larger increases by Valeant on drugs with small sales.

Dr. Irl B. Hirsch, a diabetes specialist at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle, said insulin prices had risen so much in recent years that some patients were scrimping on groceries to pay for it. The price of a package of five Lantus injectable pens from Sanofi has gone from about $179 in 2010 to $372 last year, he said, and insurance will often cover only one package at a time.

“All of this stuff that makes life so inconvenient, this would have been unheard of five or 10 years ago,” he said.

And it's not just "a few bad apples."

These fuckers are first in line for the tumbril if I have anything to say about it come the Revolution...

disgustedly,
Bright

[CaliforniaPeggy]

1. Right there with you, my dear Bright...

[djean111]

2. And the TPP will only allow them to get worse and worse. n/t

[Enthusiast]

21. +1 You nailed it.

[Dont call me Shirley]

3. Drug companies and their bastard children, drug hedge funds, are criminals.

[enlightenment]

4. I'll learn to knit -

just for the event.

[mak3cats]

13. I sincerely hope for a better outcome for you than Madame DeFarge... (eom)

[enlightenment]

24. Oh, I'll pass on that character

and just stick with just being one of the regular tricoteuses - some of them probably survived . . .

[mak3cats]

25. See, this is why I absolutely love this website...

My vocabulary is probably larger than 99.99% of the people I come in contact with, but I had to look up "tricoteuses." Thanks for the education!

[enlightenment]

26. You're welcome. :)

I agree - I learn new things from DU all the time, and often expand my vocabulary!

[CentralMass]

5. I'm wondering if the more conservative blood pressure risk levels that came out recently

were an effort to sell more bp drugs ?

[Warren Stupidity]

6. no.

bp meds are almost all dirt cheap generics. Really, not everything is a conspiracy.

[TygrBright]

7. Plus, to pull off conspiracies, you need a certain level of intelligence and organization...

...and all these fuckers have is naked greed.

And no restraints.

Water flows in the direction of least resistance.

When you make it possible for people to benefit themselves by acting on psychopathic greed and self-interest, they WILL do that.

In fact, they'll all do it at once.

And it'll LOOK like a conspiracy.

wearily,
Bright

[CentralMass]

9. Thanks.

[jmowreader]

16. Give them time...

Colchicine was a dirt-cheap generic too...until URL Pharma got hold of it, and now the price is outrageous.

[KT2000]

19. digoxin was a dirt cheap generic

until this year. Some of the manufacturers quit making it so the ones left raised their prices dramatically. Insurance companies are requiring a doctor justify prescribing it now. This is a drug that was developed in the late 1700's and is easy to make. Even though it works for me my doctor tried to talk me out of taking it. Some people have stopped taking it with disastrous results.

Digoxin is not a BP med but this is going to happen with a lot of generics. They will price some people into death and there is nothing that can be done about it in the US.

[azurnoir]

18. yes actually in December of 2014 and some of the new standards are race based too

ie there is a stricter standard for what is high blood pressure if you're Black than if you're white

http://www.aafp.org/news/health-of-the-public/20131218hypertensiongdln.html

[Jim Lane]

8. Now watch the tumbril manufacturers jack up THEIR prices. (n/t)

[MrModerate]

10. And I just bought those same five pens in Australia last week . . .

For a bit under $100 Australian, or $75 US.

Interestingly, just about everything else in Australia is more expensive than the US.

I wonder what the difference might be? It couldn't be their single-payer healthcare system that prevents price-gouging by drug companies, could it?

[StoneCarver]

12. Amen...

Obamacare (the ACA) is nothing but a (shit) package from the Heritage Foundation -We bought it and opened it. We need to get for-profit out of education and healthcare -period. We are being eaten alive -by our own. When will we ever learn? When will we ever learn? God help us!
Stonecarver

[MrModerate]

27. I'm a bit more optimistic about the ACA . . .

While admitting that it still leaves the (no-value-adding) insurance companies in powerful positions.

However . . . ACA is a big step down the road toward single-payer. And about the best we could have gotten given the intransigence of Republicans and timidity of Democrats.

If it were up to me, I'd nationalize all the insurance companies, returning about a nickel for every dollar to the stockholders (that seems generous, given how much blood they've sucked out of the system over time). I'd use some of the savings to retrain an army of medical billing clerks in some useful occupation. The CEOs would be left to their own devices, but given their history, they'd probably prove unable to perform work that's of any use.

[Maineman]

11. If our health care system was run by organized crime...

If organized crime created a health care system, what would it look like? How would it work?

People would have to pay for protection -- call it insurance.

People would be steered into taking drugs that are difficult to stop taking. Once started in drugs (called medicines), they would gradually find themselves taking more and more drugs they could not stop taking.

People would be charged very high prices for necessary medical help such important tests and procedures. Prices for many medicines would be outrageously high.

The crime bosses would buy and otherwise influence politicians who would then protect them and their profiteering.

Honest doctors would be pressured into helping the mob maximize profits, for example, by not mentioning alternative procedures that would have to be performed elsewhere, or by selling the more expensive surgical procedures and tests that need not be done, and by scaring patients into getting such procedures.

There would be rampant advertising by drug companies to brain wash naive citizens into asking for various drugs that would supposedly provide magical benefits.

[TygrBright]

14. I wish I could rec this response, too. Would you consider making it an OP? n/t

[freebrew]

17. Don't leave out...

the laws in place to stop anyone from deciding their own fate.
Or: deciding that the doctor is an idiot and do something yourself, etc.

Paragoric was once OTC, now no one can get it. It might addict someone.

In its place: hundreds of painkillers, indigestion meds, ibuprofen, tramadol.

None work as quickly or as well.

BASTARDS ALL!

[Enthusiast]

20. PLUS ONE, a huge bunch!

[whereisjustice]

15. Don't worry, we'll fix it later

[Enthusiast]

22. Kicked and recommended!

These greedy assholes are making me sick.

[Marthe48]

23. the numbers...

I have been on the same bp medicine since 1985. Always was high normal, with my lower number <90 . Then a few years ago, new high normal became +/- 80. Nothing has changed for me personally except the 'experts' have decided that 80 is a better number than 90. All it does is make my family worry.

On my own experience with BP and fasting blood sugar (acceptable fasting number was 115, was lowered to 100), I think it is all guesswork. And of course, if the number acceptable for good health is lowered, more people will be prescribed drugs to help get the number down. Just think if the numbers went up? I wonder how many big pharmas would lose profits on their shares?