Senators Question Pricing of Generic Drugs

December 09 01:00 2015 by ushadmin

Doctors at the Cleveland Clinic say that sudden price hikes on just two generic drugs– Isuprel and Nitropress–sold by Valeant Pharmaceuticals have increased the health system’s total drug costs by $8.6 million annually.

In North Carolina, doctors treating a child with toxoplasmosis were unable to obtain Daraprim, the treatment of choice, because Turing Pharmaceuticals raised the price by more than 40 times its original cost, prompting the local pharmacy to stop stocking it. Instead, doctors were forced to treat the child with an antibiotic that had not been carefully tested in children.

And cardiac arrest patients at the University of Utah Health System can no longer count on getting a life-saving generic heart drug because it has become too costly for some hospitals to stock, a leading expert on pharmaceutical shortages told a Senate committee Wednesday.

“We had to remove the medicine from our emergency crash cart, because we couldn’t continue to stock it,” says Erin Fox, director of the Drug Information Service at the University of Utah Health System, an academic health care network.

The hearing of the Senate Special Committee on Aging is the first of several planned as part of an investigation into “dramatic drug price increases–often on older, off-patent drugs.” The bipartisan probe is examining companies that snap up, and profit from, drugs that are already on the market. These drugs typically don’t require any additional research or development…