Drug firm rips off the NHS by hiking price of thyroid pill 6,000%
A DRUGS firm overcharged the NHS by millions of pounds for a vital drug to treat a thyroid condition, a watchdog found.
Now thousands of patients are set to miss out on the treatment after Concordia exploited a loophole to inflate the price by 6,000 per cent.
The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) accused the company of ‘abusing’ its dominant position to ‘overcharge’ the NHS by £100million over ten years.
It said Concordia had increased the price of liothyronine from £4.46 per pack in 2007 to £258.19 in July. In France, the drug is available for just 10p per tablet.
Next week NHS England is expected to confirm plans to stop providing the treatment to 13,000 patients because it is now considered too expensive.
Last year the health service spent more than £34million on liothyronine, a massive increase from just £600,000 in 2006.
Concordia, which is based in Canada, is now facing a fine of up to £62million – 10 per cent of its turnover – if the CMA confirms its provisional findings in a final ruling, due in the coming months.
The company exploited a regulatory loophole to ‘debrand’ its drug in 2007, meaning it could side-step NHS rules which stop firms hiking the price of branded medicines. As the only firm making the drug, it was free to set its own price.
Charities say patients taking the drug cannot cope with alternative treatments and will be forced to buy the medicine from abroad instead – where it is sold for a fraction of the UK price.
Dr Mark Vanderpump, former president of the British Thyroid Association, said: ‘Historically the drug cost the NHS about £20-30 a month. The new cost was over £300 a month.
Patients were telling me they could go to a foreign capital and pay about £4 to 5 a month, so there was a massive difference in what the NHS was being charged versus what people were access- ing it at a European level.’ Liothyronine is used to treat hypothyroidism, a condition caused by a deficiency of thyroid hormone.
It affects two in 100 women and two in 1,000 men, mainly aged over 45, and causes depression, tiredness and weight gain. Although some can be treated with cheaper drug thyroxine, experts say for 15 per cent of patients liothyronine is the only effective treatment.
Sufferer Tara Riddle told the BBC that she now buys the tablets online from abroad, as they are much cheaper. She said: ‘The NHS is paying around £900 for 100 tablets, and in Greece and Turkey they can be got for about £3. The NHS is paying way, way too much and there’s something wrong.’
Dr Andrea Coscelli, CMA chief executive, said the soaring price had come at a time in which the cost of producing the drug had ‘remained broadly stable’.
Lyn Mynott, chief executive of Thyroid UK, said the price of liothyronine was ‘ astronomically expensive’– and in France it is available for just 10p a tablet.
‘It’s all very well fining this company, but how does it actually help patients?’ she said.
‘We need the Government to get together with the manufacturer and bring down the price so patients can continue to get it.’
A Concordia spokesman said: ‘We do not believe that competition law has been infringed.
‘The pricing of liothyronine has been conducted openly and transparently with the Department of Health in the UK over a period of ten years.’