Wednesday, October 21, 2015

Pharmaceutical Companies Charge Insane Prices for Drugs Because they Can

 According to an NBC report:

  • Known as "reverse settlement payments," or "pay-to-delay" deals, the financial arrangements are a unique but common practice in the pharmaceutical industry. Essentially, they allow drug manufacturers in some instances to pay competitors not to manufacture generic versions of their products, thereby ensuring that they maintain patent protection for as long as possible.
 Sounds unethical and that's because it is. To be poor and sick in America is often nightmarish. Greed at the expense of illness and death ranks at the top of the "Unethical" things that people can do list.   But pharmaceutical companies don't operate on ethics...just greed and an endorsement by an American law:

  •  "In most industries, if you paid somebody to stay out of your market or you entered into an agreement to stay out of the market, that's a straightforward antitrust violation," says Lisl Dunlop, a partner and antitrust specialist at the Manatt, Phelps & Phillips law firm. But with drug law, it's far more complicated because of the Hatch-Waxman Act, a landmark food and drug policy legislation signed into law in 1984.
    To lower health care costs for prescription medicines, the bill streamlined the introduction of cheaper generic versions of drugs by removing the requirement that manufacturers of non-branded equivalents conduct their own costly clinical trials. Instead, it required them only to prove that the molecule in the drug is the same as that in the brand-name version.