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| Economy |
| Senator calls for investigation of gout drug price gouging |
| 2011-06-17 |
| File this 6/6/11 Press release under rent-seeking and unintended consequences: Sen. Sherrod Brown D-OH sent a letter to the company granted an exclusive right by the FDA to market a generic drug in use for 2600 years, to rethink its decision to hike the price from as little as four cents per pill to $5 per pill. He also wrote the acting director of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), asking him to investigate the ramifications of URL Pharma's massive price increase of the drug named colchicine and now marketed as Colcrys®. Wikipedia: Although colchicine has been used for centuries on patients who by & large survived taking it, it had never undergone rigorous testing with randomized control trials (RCT) to back up the indications doctors had been using to administer it. In 2006 the FDA started renting the public domain in a process called the Unapproved Drugs Initiative. URL Pharma paid for pharmokinetic testing and an RCT with 185 patients. The FDA granted the rent seeker several years of exclusive rights to market colchicine. Milking this for all it was worth, URL sued competitors to take their cheaper versions of colchicine off the market and raised the per-dose price of Colcrys® to $5.00. The consequences of this got virtually no attention from the MSM. The bill for the drug (just the part paid by state Medicaid funds) went from $1 million to $50 million per year. Editors of the New England Journal of Medicine said that the rewards of this legislation are not calibrated to the quality or value of information produced. There is no evidence of meaningful improvement to public health. It would have been much cheaper for the FDA or NIH to pay for trials themselves on widely available drugs such as colchicine. Benefits of this accrue only to URL Pharma. The burden falls primarily on self-paying patients, health insurers and taxpayers. URL Pharma posted a detailed rebuttal of the NEJM editorial. In Sept. 2010, the FDA ordered a halt to marketing of unapproved single-ingredient oral colchicine. |
| Posted by:Anguper Hupomosing9418 |