Why are pharmacorps raising the price of old standard drugs sky-high? [View all]

[HiPointDem]

One of the answers is here:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10022101705#post8


August 9, 2012

Soaring Ointment Prices Are a Dermatologic Mystery
By KATIE THOMAS

Generic creams routinely prescribed by doctors have been undergoing rapid price increases, an example of the murky and often illogical world of drug pricing....

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/10/business/prescription-skin-creams-jump-in-price.html


December 29, 2012

Questcor Finds Profits, at $28,000 a Vial
By ANDREW POLLACK

THE doctor was dumbfounded: a drug that used to cost $50 was now selling for $28,000 for a 5-milliter vial.

The physician, Dr. Ladislas Lazaro IV, remembered occasionally prescribing this anti-inflammatory, named H.P. Acthar Gel, for gout back in the early 1990s. Then the drug seemed to fade from view. Dr. Lazaro had all but forgotten about it, until a sales representative from a company called Questcor Pharmaceuticals appeared at his office and suggested that he try it for various rheumatologic conditions...

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/30/business/questcor-finds-profit-for-acthar-drug-at-28000-a-vial.html


February 15, 2006

A Cancer Drug Shows Promise, at a Price That Many Can't Pay
By ALEX BERENSON

Doctors are excited about the prospect of Avastin, a drug already widely used for colon cancer, as a crucial new treatment for breast and lung cancer, too. But doctors are cringing at the price the maker, Genentech, plans to charge for it: about $100,000 a year.

That price, about double the current level as a colon cancer treatment, would raise Avastin to an annual cost typically found only for medicines used to treat rare diseases that affect small numbers of patients...

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/15/business/15drug.html


The Price of Gout Drug, Colchicine, Goes Up
Learn why sticker shock may soon be a side effect of taking this centuries-old medication.

By Andy Miller

4/20/10 For the past few years, Peggy Lewis has paid $10 or less for a 90-day supply of her gout drug, colchicine. But Lewis, 71, fears she will soon be forced to pay hundreds of dollars more for that medication.

Lewis, of Fairfield, Ohio, has taken colchicine for about 20 years to prevent attacks of gout, a form of arthritis that causes flares of sudden pain, stiffness and swelling in joints.

But sometime this year, Lewis will have to replace her current version with a brand-name colchicine medication, Colcrys, which, she was told, could cost up to $550 for a 3-month supply...

http://www.arthritistoday.org/news/colchicine-gout-drug-price053.php


FDA Orders Manufacturers to Stop Making Colchicine
Inexpensive supplies of gout drug colchicine may soon disappear from store shelves.

By Brenda Goodman

10/1/10 Companies that make unapproved versions of the drug colchicine, which is used to treat and prevent gout and familial Mediterranean fever, have been ordered by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, or FDA, to discontinue manufacturing these pills within 45 days and to stop shipping them within 90 days.

The action means that within a few months, as pharmacies run through their supplies, the only kind of colchicine likely to be available to consumers will be a brand name version approved in 2009 called Colcrys.

So-called unapproved medications like colchicine are drugs that have been used by doctors since before the FDA began reviewing and approving new therapies in the 1960s, and they include medical mainstays like the painkiller morphine...

The FDA contends that these drugs may put patients at risk because they’ve never been reviewed for safety. Since 2006, regulators have been pushing companies that make and sell these older medications to put them through the rigorous approval process, which includes studying medications in clinical trials. In return, the manufacturers are promised market exclusivity...

http://www.arthritistoday.org/news/colchicine-gout-drug-discontinued086.php


March 12, 2006

A Cancer Drug's Big Price Rise Disturbs Doctors and Patients
By ALEX BERENSON

On Feb. 3, Joyce Elkins filled a prescription for a two-week supply of nitrogen mustard, a decades-old cancer drug used to treat a rare form of lymphoma. The cost was $77.50.

On Feb. 17, Ms. Elkins, a 64-year-old retiree who lives in Georgetown, Tex., returned to her pharmacy for a refill. This time, following a huge increase in the wholesale price of the drug, the cost was $548.01...

The medicine, also known as Mustargen, was developed more than 60 years ago and is among the oldest chemotherapy drugs. For decades, it has been blended into an ointment by pharmacists and used as a topical treatment for a cancer called cutaneous T-cell lymphoma, a form of cancer that mainly affects the skin.

Last August, Merck, which makes Mustargen, sold the rights to manufacture and market it and Cosmegen, another cancer drug, to Ovation Pharmaceuticals, a six-year-old company in Deerfield, Ill., that buys slow-selling medicines from big pharmaceutical companies...

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/12/business/12price.html