Amy Klobuchar, the freshman U.S. Senator from Minnesota, has penned an opinion piece on “sudden and dramatic” price increases in prescription drugs that she argues are not only wrong, but in many cases illegal. Here’s an excerpt from Klobuchar’s article:

Two years ago, Jesse and Lisa Benson became the proud parents [...]]]>

Amy Klobuchar, the freshman U.S. Senator from Minnesota, has penned an opinion piece on “sudden and dramatic” price increases in prescription drugs that she argues are not only wrong, but in many cases illegal. Here’s an excerpt from Klobuchar’s article:

Two years ago, Jesse and Lisa Benson became the proud parents of twin girls, Anna and Sophia. However, Sophia was born with a rare heart condition called patent ductus arteriosis, known as PDA, a disorder that prevents holes from healing in the hearts of premature infants.

At Children’s Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota, Sophia’s heart condition was treated successfully with intravenous indomethacin, a drug sold under the name Indocin IV. The drug has been around for several decades and is the standard nonsurgical treatment for this life-threatening condition.

What the Bensons did not know at the time, but the hospital did, was that the price for this drug had just increased by nearly 1,300 percent, from $108 to $1,500 per unit.

The sudden and dramatic price increase was not in response to new research, marketing or legal costs. The only thing that had changed was the fact that an Illinois-based company, Ovation Pharmaceuticals, had cornered the market for drug treatments of PDA…

As it turns out, Ovation has made a specialty of acquiring the rights to drugs that are essential for treating serious medical conditions. For example, Ovation acquired three other drugs from Merck and then quickly jacked up the prices:

• Cosmegen, used to treat pediatric cancers, went up 3,437 percent.
• Mustargen, used to treat brain tumors and certain lymphomas, increased 979 percent.
• Diuril sodium, a diuretic used in infants and neonatals, increased 864 percent.

Ovation may be among the worst, but it is far from the only offender.

Researchers at the University of Minnesota College of Pharmacy have found many examples of “extraordinary” drug price increases, defined as cases where the price at least doubles overnight. The incidence of these price increases has also been rising sharply in recent years…

We can all be grateful for the wonders of modern medicine, including life-saving and life-enhancing pharmaceutical drugs. But our gratitude is no excuse for drug companies to engage in monopolistic and illegal price-gouging.

Amen, Amy. It’s so nice to hear a U.S. senator stand up for the people as opposed to the big drug companies. We’ll be watching your career with interest.

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The most profitable venture for drug [...]]]> Patents were created to protect inventors’ right to their discoveries and to promote the progress of society. But over time, the drug industry has come to know patents as a money-printing machine. Today, drug patents actually work against their original purpose — discouraging real innovation in the pharmaceutical industry.

The most profitable venture for drug companies is stretching out the patent of a billion-dollar drug. Patents make it illegal for a competitor to sell the same drug for a certain period of time. The longer a drug company can stretch out the patent life, the more money it can make. Extending a patent a few extra months translates into millions of dollars of added revenue.

Once a drug company’s patent expires, generic versions of the patented drug can be produced and sold. Since brand-name drugs never lower their prices in response to competition, drug sales plummet. Pharmagossip discusses this further in its post, Big Pharma’s Big Problem contd. – the rise of generics in the US. If only one generic is produced, sales of the brand-name drug remain relatively high because generics only lower their prices in response to competition. But if 50 generics are released, prices fall drastically and the life of the brand-name drug is essentially over.

For this reason, Big Pharma focuses most of its new product development efforts on “gaming” the federal government to extend patent and exclusivity rights. Drug makers essentially retest the same drug for other uses in order to lengthen the exclusivity period.

A good example is Schering-Plough’s Claritin, the antihistamine. Claritin’s patent and exclusivity rights were nearing expiration, so the drug maker retested Claritin with the FDA for slightly different uses and called it Clarinex. Schering-Plough then launched a huge promotional campaign to switch users from Claritin to Clarinex because it was an “improvement” over the existing drug, even though its chemical composition is almost identical. More on this common practice here, with a specific discussion of Claritin/Clarinex here.

How long will consumers put up with this kind of duplicity?