When Martin Shkreli took the nation by storm in his one-man Greek tragedy sans a hero-protagonist, he was very clear in his message—don’t hate the player, hate the game. Shkreli’s point was that he wasn’t the only greedy bastard running a monopolistically soulless pharmaceutical company. We all knew he was right, but he was also a jerk who needed to be punished, as we hope the rest of his peer group is. Another Valeant Pharmaceuticals bought a treatment for lead poisoning—calcium EDTA—back in 2012-2013. Since that time, they’ve done what we’ve seen these companies do every single time: they’ve jacked up the price of a life-saving drug treatment.
But after Valeant Pharmaceuticals bought the drug three years ago, it hiked the price for one course of treatment from $950 to $27,000.
One of the problems with hiking up the prices of these drugs that are used to save (mostly) children from acute lead poisoning is that they become less affordable.
Yet Kosnett and Durrani say in their letter that they became aware of the problem when Children’s Hospital in Oakland told the California Poison Control System that the hospital couldn’t afford the 2015 wholesale price of $25,000 quoted for 5 ampules. The doctors write that that single box is about the amount that would be needed to effectively treat one child with a 5-day chelation course. In Canada, that treatment cost would be about $75, based on their estimates.
The reason calcium EDTA warrants a high cost is unclear. It also is a food preservative, found in everything from pickled cabbage to pinto beans. A Valeant spokesman told Stat’s Ed Silverman that the price increases were related to a low purchase volume and high cost of maintaining an appropriate inventory of the drug. The cost to buy supplies, the spokesman said, can be many times that gained from annual sales, and the drug has a “relatively limited” shelf life, so they can’t keep it forever.
The price hike, and Valeant in particular, have been lightning rods for public debate over the business of drugs and health in our country. It’s forced Hillary Clinton to lay out a plan to rein in Big Pharma drug prices.
Clinton proposed creating a federal task force whose job would be to monitor drug prices in an effort to penalize those that pass along unjustified increases to consumers. This federal body would also be tasked with seeking cheaper alternatives to high-priced drugs. This task force would be especially handy at corralling drugmakers that, like Valeant, have a propensity to acquire new therapies and then increase their prices without making material changes to the formulation or manufacturing process. It could also curb prescription drug inflation at companies like Mylan, where double-digit-percentage annual price increases seem to be the norm.
Democrat Rep. Kurt Schrader (D-Oregon) has a bill he’s been trying to get support for and the fact that companies like Valeant and Mylan cannot help themselves and their greed is really a blessing in disguise.
U.S. Rep. Kurt Schrader, D-Ore., said his bill to stop such price hikes has picked up 13 co-sponsors. “If this sort of thing continues, I think we have a good shot of getting this in some of the end-of-session bills,” he said.
[...]
His bill would break monopolies on generic drugs, allowing other companies to speed similar products through the long FDA process.
Valeant’s excuse that the short shelf life of calcium-EDTA and the fact that large-scale production of the drug is not needed has led to their prices is hollow.
Poison control experts now say that US centers pay about $5000 per gram for the drug, compared to $15 per gram for Canadians purchasing from a French company, a 33,300% difference. In a 6-year period, these experts also say, Valeant increased the US price of the drug by as much as 7200%.
[...]
Meanwhile, their colleagues in Canada can buy the same amount of drug from SERB Laboratories, a French company, for about $15, or 332 times less than Valeant’s cost to US facilities. In Canada, the amount of drug needed to treat a child with lead poisoning thus costs about $15 a day, the doctors write. Based on their numbers, in the US, that one-day total for one child is about $5,000.
The executives at these companies should work on a drug that allows them to feel empathy once again because this is beyond the pale.