A cancer medication called Xtandi costs $189,800 per year and was developed with taxpayer dollars. The U.S. government has a responsibility for ending the exclusive patents that give them their profits. The Department of Health and Human Services is currently considering whether to allow the generic manufacturing of Xtandi, which could drop the price of a pill from $400 to $3 overnight.
Category Archive: Bad Pharma
Drug companies raised the prices on hundreds of medications on Jan. 1, with most prices up 5% to 6% on average. In addition, a report says that Lilly, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, and Pfizer are among the companies and trade groups to have donated $8 million to Republicans who voted against certifying Biden’s election victory.
The public has been told that pharma needs money to develop new drugs, but unfortunately, that’s a huge lie. As biopharmadive recently, “some of the biggest pharmaceutical companies, sitting on large and growing sums of cash, are funneling those funds into major share buyback programs and acquisitions of smaller biotech companies.
(Axios) Second-quarter results are still pouring in, but so far, a vast majority of health care companies are reporting profits that many people assumed would not have been possible as the pandemic continued. Drug sales fell across many pharma companies but cutting administrative and research costs kept earnings at industry highs.
WHAT’S HAPPENING: In the Build Back Better bill, Democrats are actually proposing limiting insulin prices to $35 a month but Republicans can’t have any of that. PhRMA spent pharma’s money well and bought some politicians while people who need insulin are suffering.
LEAD IN: Pharma companies are a business and have the right to make money but at what cost and how much is enough? The world’s makers of Covid-19 vaccines—saw over $10 billion in new wealth, with the Moderna’s CEO alone adding over $800 million to his fortune. Is this acceptable?
SUMMARY: The U.S. government has provided Moderna with nearly $10 billion in taxpayer money for research and development and the purchase of 500 million doses of this mRNA COVID-19 vaccine. This includes almost the entire cost of clinical development. Additionally, Moderna used patents and non-exclusive rights that the U.S. government made available to them to make this COVID-19 vaccine. But Moderna wants all the profits for themselves.
SUMMARY: Large-cap pharma companies are trading higher in the morning hours after White House unveiled a framework for a deal on President Biden’s social spending package on Thursday leaving out a key provision that allowed Medicare to negotiate lower prescription drug prices. In 2019, Medicare Part D covered more than 3,500 prescription drug products, with total spending of $183 billion, not accounting for rebates. The plan to allow the government to negotiate drug prices for Medicare is dead due to big pharma buying politicians.