Prescription Drug Prices Up 100%-1,000%

"Cirrhosis" or psoriasis?

 

WTF? First oil and now this? What is next? What the hell is going on???

 

Well, there are always going to be examples of stuff like that... I can only speak to what I know. Basically it costs $1.5 Billion now to develop a new drug. Of every 100 drugs that hit the market I believe the number is about 30 that will EVER sell in a volume great enough to recoup the costs. Of that same 100 institutions such as schools MIGHT make 3 of them and the Federal gov will have a significant hand in ONE of them.

If you don't want to spend much on your drugs then ask your doctor for a generic or just don't buy it...unless it is a life threatening disease just take a pass on it.

Also from a payment perspective as Insurance companies pay less and less for drugs and cover more and more lives the poor cash paying customer gets charged even more. When drugs were mostly paid for by cash paying customers pharmaceutical companies charged less... of course back then it only cost about $500MM to bring a new drug to market.

Now for the good news... Over the next 5 years there will be more than $200 BILLION in pharmaceuticals moving from branded to generic. There will probably be a loss of more than 25,000 sales jobs in the pharma industry and probably more than 15% of the main office personnel who will loose their jobs too...

So, anyway, maybe that gives you a little bit of insight. Now here is another question for you... Why don't you think there are a bunch of new antibiotics hitting the market these days? Well...there is just not money there. You make a super drug that kills Vancomycin resistant MRSA and guess what...the only infections that you will be allowed to treat with that drug will be confirmed VrMRSA infections. There are not very many of them thankfully, but they are often deadly and each treatment would have to cost $100,000 just to break even in 10 years... I am just estimating so take the numbers with a grain of salt, but it has been proven over and over again that capitalism works and that is something we are completely missing in medicine today...

You might check out The Value of Medicine series that talks about the industry and drug development costs. That is where I got most of that info from...

Sorry for the cost increase and all I can say is that I have never seen that with any of the products I have sold. We have had years where we did not go up 2% and we have had years where we went of 15% but I have never seen any of our products go up more than that in a year.

Good luck to your gf!

 

He must have meant psoriasis. A cream isn't going to cure Cirrhosis.......NO WAY!

 

Personally, I think the drug companies are over-developing. They are in a war to come out with the new "it" drug so they can market it and charge a premium, when there are plenty of older drugs that will do the trick. Problem is, after 20 years they lose exclusivity and the drugs go generic.

Case in point--occassionally I'll get a migraine. Went thru 3 or 4 different "it" drugs and finally my doctor keyed me in on an old prescription called phrenilin, a $5 generic. Worked like a charm. Same thing with this contact dermatitis I had, went thru a couple of ointments and finally the dermatologist prescribed a $5 generic called Lidex and it took care of the rash in a couple of days.

I've been reading about prescription drugs showing up in groundwater, I am now wondering how to dispose of all this top-dollar garbage I paid for without it affecting the environment. And in the future I'll be sure to ask for a basic, old school generic before trying the new-fangled "it" drug.

 

I'm a pharmacy tech at a mail order store. I do a lot of ordering so I am pretty familiar with pricing. This is BS. I haven't seen much change at all. e.g. Plavix is still roughly $3,000 for 500 tabs.

If prices were hiked, your pharmacies would fall apart. It takes insurance companies MONTHS to adjust to pricing. When a new generic becomes available it sometimes takes an insurance company a month or two to even recognize and pay for it over a brand name.

 

RMX,

You are out of your mind... A couple hundred million per drug on branding??? That is INSANE! MOST drugs don't even SELL a couple of hundred mill in a YEAR! Sure there are the billion dollar babies. We all love to have those, but they make or break you...usually BOTH! They make the drug company while they are on patent and then they break you when they go off patent! SUCK!

I agree there is TO MUCH money spent on actual advertising, but the BULK of the money spent on "marketing" a drug is actually samples... Those help everyone. Unless of course you see one of those doctors that either does not see reps at all or maybe they do see reps but don't take samples for some reason. That is unfortunate for the patient as companies provide samples for patient to try BEFORE they buy, thus helping you NOT to waste money on something that does not work for you.

As for old drugs doing the trick. YOU BET! There are some good generics on the market RIGHT NOW and TONS more to come in the not to distant future! Every person is different, some respond to one drug some to another. If you can get by w/ a $5 generic then knock yourself out! That is AWESOME...others it might take the full on brand stuff to do the trick.

We should all be thankful we have choices! If gov. gets involved your choices will be what THEY (gov.) choose FOR YOU! You will no longer have a choice!

James

 

PCar's point still stands. You said "probably a couple hundred million per drug", which is clearly not the case. Pfizer's entire advertising budget is $484 million dollars by your account. Pfizer sells 200 or so different drugs (I grew tired of counting them all on their site).

 

I'm in the business too, probably work for your competitor.

Luke is correct, it's BS. And they qualify the BS early in the story:

If 200 drugs had a 100% price increase four years ago, that means 400 drugs would get it this year. Out of how many THOUSANDS on the market? I see drug costs every day, from the people that are paying the bills. The cost of drugs in my business, based on year over year expenditure growth is called 'Trend'. Trend has been under 10% for a few years, and lately has been closer to 5%. Generics are driving most of the decrease. Are there outliers? Sure. Is it a National Crisis like USA Today convinced you of?

No. Hell no.

 

Why is there a continual "debut" of "new medical conditions?"

Doctors are continually diagnosing kids with all sorts of crap and parents are actually allowing, and believing (the doctors) that their kids should be put on meds. And drug companies are paying doctors to do so. They are being bought out, and instead of helping kids, they're ruining their minds from birth and fattening the pockets at the same time.

I'll tell a doctor to shove a fat one down his throat and up his ass before I put my kid on any sort of medication. Everyones up in arms about oil companies when they should really be angry at drug companies. It's ridiculous.

My friend has to take meds for a newly diagnosed case of arthritis. The **** costs $1700!!!!!! He has to pay $1000, as that's his deductable.

 

With the price of prescription drugs now, people will start to put their medicine cabinet contents into their Wills.

 

Well said, my wife has worked in the industry for 14 years and the article that came out this week is based on a few obscure drugs, not the whole industry. It sure does get everyone worked up and that is exactly why they print this junk. The press wants to get everyone on the free drug band wagon.

A doctor can only operate on you or write you a prescription, so drugs play a huge part in practicing medicine, it wouldn't be smart to run the drug companies out of business!

 

Yea everyone complains about the cost of their Viagra and they say they can't afford it, and then they tell you all about the trip they went on or the new TV they got. People have been convinced they should have their drugs free, my dad used to tell me nothing is free. By the way have you priced out the cost of a vintage Ferrari tool set..........much more than $1700.00.

 

Profit and profit margins are what they are... As I stated before if you don't like the cost of your drugs go get a generic. There is probably something out there for you. There are lots of good ones out there. You may need to take them 5X a day and you may have more side effects from them...but hey, it only cost you a $4 or $5 copay. Do you go down to your local Porsche or Ferrari dealer and DEMAND that they sell you one of their products for the price of a Honda civic? I doubt it! Do you ***** because they have higher profit margins (though not higher profits) than drug companies? I doubt it. But by god make a drug that can save someones life that costs a company a $1.5 BILLION to research and develop and all of a sudden it should be FREE! While we are QUICKLY moving away from capitalist form of medicine (and that is TERRIBLY UNFORTUNATE) we are still at that point so if you want to play you have to pay...simple as that!

If you want the best RXes, cars, TV's, cell phones, or whatever I think you should have to pay! As noted by another poster... NOTHING IN LIFE IS FREE! Get used to it and be glad you have a choice. If you find a product is to expensive then go buy something else. You might need to ask your doctor or pharmacist if there are alternatives but there almost always are these days.

Here is another bit of info some here might not be aware of...

When I patent for a pharmaceutical product is granted ALL of the information about that drug is immediately available. That means that countries that do not recognize and protect patents can in fact begin producing the product right away. What that also means is that 6 months to 1 year before a big products patent expires a generic house has already stock piled MILLIONS of dollars worth of product. The DAY that patent expires they can ship it! BUT, what normally happens is that 3 months or more before the expiration the companies start shipping and thumb their nose at Big Pharma (remember the generic companies do NOTHING, ZERO, ZIP, NADA to find and develop new drugs, they are parasites sucking off the big discovery based drug companies) and ship the product early! Then they dare you to get it off the market BEFORE the patent does expire!

How big of a risk are you willing to put your personal income at? Drug companies do it EVERY DAY! Millions of dollars at a time! Sometimes it pays off big (Nexium, Crestor, Viagra, Advair) sometimes it is an utter failure (Raxar, Trovan, etc)...

YMMV, but BE GLAD FOR CHOICE! If the government takes over your health care you will NO LONGER HAVE CHOICE!!!
James

 

Pcar928fan has it right.

The generics are the reason why the Ethical pharmaceutical companies have to make back their investment quickly.

The patent on the drug starts to expire prior to the drug being developed, tested, approved by the FDA and launched into the market.
By the time the drug is launched, it is just a few years away from being copied by a generic company.

 

Pcar928fan has it right. +2

Waa waa everyone wants top of the line drugs from those mean corporations who spend millions to develop and get the drugs approved by the FDA. The reason your medical bills are so high is because we are all underwriting a massive amount of people with no insurance and people get better health care than they used too. Americans are living longer too!

 

Just shop around online. I think US consumers get hit with R&D costs in the prices while other countries don't to the same degree.

 

Thats correct. Many other countries either don't respect patents or have gov't price controls that keep the end price of the drug down. My sister works for CRS at the Library of Congress. Did a big project for a Congressman several years ago about prescription drug prices. CRS concluded that the high price of drugs in this country was due to R&D costs with less than 20% of any drug become a commercial success and the indirect costs of price controls of drugs in developed countries with gov't provided health care as well as subsidizing the low cost of drugs sold in developing countries.
The idea that docs will treat conditions because there is pressure from the drug companies to prescribe a drug is preposterous. More likely a patient comes in with some complaint and will demand treatment even though it is a benign condition. I've had people leave my office because I told them there was noting wrong with their -insert body part here- and they don't need an operation or some prescription for treatment. These people will then doctor shop until they find some one to do the surgery or give them the script they want.
Drugs are expensive because they cost a sh*t load of money to produce. The second pill will cost a penny to make the first will cost $1,500,000,000 to get to market. If you sell 1,000,000 pills each pill will cost $1500. Thats why treatment for rare conditions costs so much. An arthritis treatment like Remicade costs several hundred dollars a dose because its only good for Rheumatoid arthritis and Inflammatory bowel disease with fistulas. typical treatment is a shot very couple of weeks for six weeks. That doesn't add up to a lot of doses hence each dose costs a bundle.