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More drugmakers hike U.S. prices as new year begins:
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Drugmakers including Bristol-Myers Squibb Co (BMY.N), Gilead Sciences Inc (GILD.O), and Biogen Inc (BIIB.O) hiked U.S. list prices on more than 50 drugs on Wednesday, bringing total New Year’s Day drug price increases to more than 250, according to data analyzed by healthcare research firm 3 Axis Advisors.
Reuters reported on Tuesday that drugmakers including Pfizer Inc (PFE.N), GlaxoSmithKline PLC (GSK.L) and Sanofi SA (SASY.PA) were planning to increase prices on more than 200 drugs in the United States on Jan. 1.
Nearly all of the price increases are below 10% and the median price increase is around 5%, according to 3 Axis.
More early year price increases could still be announced.
Soaring U.S. prescription drug prices are expected to again be a central issue in the presidential election. President Donald Trump, who made bringing them down a core pledge of his 2016 campaign, is running for re-election in 2020.
[...] The United States, which leaves drug pricing to market competition, has higher prices than in other countries where governments directly or indirectly control the costs, making it the world’s most lucrative market for manufacturers.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Thursday January 02 2020, @10:44PM (2 children)
That's why there's increasing calls even from psychiatrists and psychologists to abandon chemical treatments, deep brain stimulation, and electroshock. They don't treat the cause, and the side effects make the patient much more likely to relapse.
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by NickM on Friday January 03 2020, @03:14AM (1 child)
Those drugs truly helps some peoples, nobody really understand why¹. I suffer from crippling unmanageable anxiety without underlying cause, 10mg of escitalopram² is the difference between me not leaving my house unless forced by my hunger and me having a great job where I am productive to society and appreciated by my colleagues.
1- second paragraph [sciencemag.org]
2- Not the racemix citalopram, that's a drug with a strong anticholinergic component responsible for almost all of the off target side effects. Most newish drugs, not the rarer new new drugs, replacing existing one have a tremendously better UX but the government only pays for the shitty yet almost equally effective version so it is what most Canadian doctors are prescribing by default ! Luckily for me, I have gold plated work insurance to complement the public regime so I get the fanciest drugs for almost nothing.
I a master of typographic, grammatical and miscellaneous errors !
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Friday January 03 2020, @12:19PM
I'm glad that works for you, but you two are talking about orthogonal issues.
Lets say we all agree that vitamin C cures scurvy. Given that scurvy seems to be the disease of not having enough vit C that seems pretty likely.
Now we can argue all day about how vit C is a scam because it doesn't cure broken legs, or how marketing aspirin as a treatment for scurvy is not a scam. But none of that has anything to do with the core issues of what scurvy is or what vit C can actually treat.
Note that aspirin is not the worst idea for scurvy anyway. It won't fix the problem, but it'll sweep it under the rug via pain killing anti-inflamatory effect. There seems to be a common problem among non-scientific non-medical people of not being able to tell the difference between something that fixes the symptoms vs fixing the actual cause of the problem. This is an especially big problem for psych drugs, although not entirely all.