Bernie Sanders asks why formerly free drug now costs $375,000 a year
72 replies, posted
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-healthcare-catalyst/senator-sanders-to-ask-why-drug-once-free-now-costs-375k-idUSKCN1PT0ZJ?utm_source=applenews
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders sent a letter to Catalyst Pharmaceuticals on Monday asking it to justify its decision to charge $375,000 annually for a
medication that for years has been available to patients for free.
The drug, Firdapse, is used to treat Lambert-Eaton Myasthenic Syndrome (LEMS), a rare neuromuscular disorder, according to the letter, made available to Reuters by the senator’s
office. The disorder affects about one in 100,000 people in the United States.
In the letter dated Feb. 4, Sanders asked Catalyst to lay out the financial and non-financial factors that led the company to set the list price at $375,000, and say how many patients
would suffer or die as a result of the price and how much it was paying to purchase or produce the drug.
For years, patients have been able to get the same drug for free from Jacobus Pharmaceuticals, a small New Jersey-based drug company, which offered it through a U.S. Food and
Drug Administration (FDA) program called “compassionate use.” Florida-based Catalyst received FDA approval of Firdapse in November, along with exclusive rights to market the
medication for several years
This is not sustainable in any shape or form. If practices like this continue the US population will stand on the brink on a medical disaster.
We already are. We just don't care about the poor who are suffering from it.
For years, patients have been able to get the same drug for free from Jacobus Pharmaceuticals, a small New Jersey-based drug company, which offered it through a U.S. Food and
Drug Administration (FDA) program called “compassionate use.” Florida-based Catalyst received FDA approval of Firdapse in November, along with exclusive rights to market the
medication for several years
how does that work?
if the products already in the market from another company... then this one comes along and 'just gets' exclusivity for years? like... what?
And this is why capitalism is inherently untenable.
These parasites complain about the proles getting handouts they don't deserve, but there is absolutely no way anyone can defend you suddenly gaining exclusive rights to distribute something that someone else was handing out for free and deciding to then charge a king's ransom for it just because you can and your new victims can't fight back against it. You don't deserve the money you're extorting and whoever said you did deserves to have any authority they had to say so stripped away permanently. You've earned none of it.
One of the most popular and highest-ever rated American TV shows was about a middle-class white man making drugs to pay for his cancer treatment
Nobody batted an eye at this premise
I reckon there ARE good reasons for a drug to increase in price. For example, when a new application of a drug is implied, further testing is required. Research costs money.
If only America's health care was actually fair.
People have been dying from 'poverty side effects' like diabetes in the millions for decades. It has been sustained since before world war I, why you think it would change over angry social media is a mystery.
because the effects are finally reaching public awareness through social media, and a huge percent of the country is now living in this "poverty" of paycheck to paycheck wage slavery and ever-diminishing affordability of life, which is compounding on itself more and more every day.
there's a boiling point to everything.
Oh god, the worst thing is that people actually support drugs being that expensive. American healthcare culture terrifies me.
My medical insurance doesn't cover for seeing the doctor; and I need to see the doctor to get a bill of approval to work on getting my license.
But I can't afford the bills because my job doesn't pay me enough, but they've also been asking me to get a license.
Tell them to pay for it then? Unless your condition of hire was that you were capable of getting that license within X time after hire, they want it they can fucking pay for it.
You think I have a position to argue in a corporate part time job. Thats adorable.
You do have a position to argue, you're not on a contract most likely, time to find new work and don't stay more than the 2 weeks you customarily should provide them.
A company being "granted" the power to make a drug exclusively isn't capitalism.
It's due to well-meaning regulation gone bad. When drugs go to market, they'll be approved to target specific diseases in certain populations because that's what clinical trails have shown the drug to be safe and effective for. Naturally, many of these drugs will be highly likely to be effective in similar diseases or other patient populations and doctors will often prescribe the drugs in these cases, sometimes with a little nudge by pharma companies though they really shouldn't. The reason they shouldn't is because technically, the drug often hasn't gone through the testing to prove efficacy or safety. A common example is giving certain drugs to children when they haven't been extensively tested in those populations. The problem is, is that there is very little incentive to run an expensive clinical trial when you can still prescribe off-label. Seeing this gap in knowledge, the FDA (and possibly other regulatory bodies) brought in a system whereby a company could be rewarded for running a trial with market exclusivity, mainly for off-patent drugs.
Here's where the problems begin. Many times, these drugs have been used off-label for many years. They've already been shown to safe and effective so companies can run a quick and easy trial, get their exclusivity and then price gouge. No real research has been done. No risk was involved. The FDA can give exclusivity but it cannot regulate pricing. Everyone knows that this is shitty behaviour but when there's money to be made... The companies claim that it's the insurance companies that foot the extra cost and that patients aren't effected but we all know what the insurance companies will do to cover the increased costs.
Then there are other cases where monopolies form because no one can enter the market for stupid reasons. Drugs for rare diseases will often be produced by one company (often doing it at a loss just because stopping production is a dick thing to do). Evil companies buy these producers and ramp up the price. Normally, one would think that a competitor would step in, these are off-patent drugs after all. The thing is, for generics to be approved they need to show bio-equivalence to what has already been approved. And if you're the only manufacturer, you might not be so keen on giving your competitor your product so that they can destroy your monopoly. Regulations to ensure generic drugs are as safe and effective as the the original are a no-brainer but something needs to change to prevent unscrupulous people from gaming the system.
I think the drug was not properly on the market in the US, therefore when this company bought its rights they get the exclusivity rights that come with it, its still absolutely scum tier to charge almost 400k list price for something a compounding pharmacy was readily able to make for very little charge.
Moat of the grunt work from testing comes from government subsidies. None of the recouped costs go back to the public. Even if it were true that the poor multibillion dollar pharmas had to pay a bunch for the testing, how long would it really take them to make that back qhen they're charging 500% markups?
Yes, it is. Capitalism does not mean anti-statism. The thing that makes a society capitalist is who it awards the rights to the wealth generated by an endeavor to, not the state's role in the market.
It's not laissez faire, but that doesn't mean it's not capitalist.
A government agency "granting" exclusivity to a product already in the wild is cronyism. No actual capitalist will tell you Cronyism is a good thing.
You have no idea what state they're in, they could very will be in an at-will state and doing basically anything that rubs management the wrong way will land you straight in the unemployment office.
That's irrelevant, "cronyism" doesn't make it un-capitalist, regardless of capitalists' opinion on whether or not "cronyism" is a good thing. There's nothing about the existence of "cronyism" that violates the definition of capitalism.
Too bad, this is what capitalism inevitably leads to. Whatever idealized, corruption-free fantasy image of capitalism you're about to preach doesn't and never will exist. It's rotten at its core.
Yes it does. In a capitalist system products are supposed to be manufactured based on supply and demand, and new manufacturers can enter the market bringing down the price of products. A government agency granting exclusivity is the very opposite of that. Perhaps if you didn't learn economics from r/latestagecapitalism you would know this.
There will never be a true free market capitalist system. Without a government or legal system, creative works and R&D would be impossible to profit from because of a lack of patent or copyright, anyone could just come out selling a clone of the exact same product. The "free market" is a delusional fantasy.
Patents are quite different from exclusivity grated to a drug long after the patent has expired.
It's still a privately owned entity manufacturing a good for profit. This sounds a lot like the equal opposite of "not real socialism."
In so much as any intellectual property law is "not capitalism," which I think you'll have a much harder time claiming "all good capitalists" agree with.
Again, the fact that the government intervenes in the market doesn't make the system un-capitalist, so long as you still have a market economy in which the capitalists still own the rights to all wealth generated by any endeavor under their "ownership", you've still got a capitalist system.
The fact is that there will be laws governing the system. And there will be a government passing and enforcing those laws. And if wealth inequality is not kept under control, there will be a power imbalance, and that government will eventually fall to corruption. That, among other reasons, is why trying to push towards "pure" capitalism only makes things worse.
The argument was that Cronyism is bad. Drop the labels.
I don't believe that patents should grant manufacturing exclusivity, rather they should compel others to contribute to the R&D costs that someone put into the invention.
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