Remember how the White House made that $80 billion deal with PhRMA in order to get their support for the overall passage of the bill in exchange for a ban on drug price negotiation of drugs by the government and drug re-importation from Canda?
Well, it seems that PhRMA are jacking up the prices for their precious prescription drugs right before the health insurance reform bill takes effect. It's like what credit card companies did in jacking up their interest rates before the credit reform bill took effect. Anyone want to bet that insurance companies are going to do the same as well right with insurance premiums before the insurance exchange and the public option gets started in 2013?
Here's more from the New York Times below the jump, and it gives even more credence to our fight against the Eshoo amendment in favor of Senator Brown's amendment:
In the last year, the industry has raised the wholesale prices of brand-name prescription drugs by about 9 percent, according to industry analysts. That will add more than $10 billion to the nation’s drug bill, which is on track to exceed $300 billion this year. By at least one analysis, it is the highest annual rate of inflation for drug prices since 1992.
The drug trend is distinctly at odds with the direction of the Consumer Price Index, which has fallen by 1.3 percent in the last year.
This same pattern happened when Congress passed the Medicare Part D bill, with its ineffective trigger, in 2003, leading us to the high overpayments we're making today as taxpayers in subsidizing these greedy bastards:
A Harvard health economist, Joseph P. Newhouse, said he found a similar pattern of unusual price increases after Congress added drug benefits to Medicare a few years ago, giving tens of millions of older Americans federally subsidized drug insurance. Just as the program was taking effect in 2006, the drug industry raised prices by the widest margin in a half-dozen years.
When PhRMA raised their drug prices this year by $10 billion, they effectively wiped out the first year of projected savings under the bill. And what's to keep PhRMA from raising their prices continually over the next three years? Nothing.
Name-brand prices have risen even as prices of widely used generic drugs have fallen by about 9 percent in the last year, Professor Schondelmeyer said. But name brands account for 78 percent of total prescription drug spending in this country. And as long as a name-brand drug still has patent protection it faces no price competition from generics.
And now with the news about PhRMa managing to get over 40 lawmakers to spout the same script in favor of the twelve-year window for data exclusivity for biologics under the Eshoo amendment, it's precisely why we're fighting to help lower the prices of drugs by allowing biologic generics to come onto the market sooner under Senator Brown's amendment!
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