Drug firm rips off the NHS by hiking price of thyroid pill 6,000%
A DRUGS firm overcharged the NHS by tens of millions for a vital thyroid treatment, a watchdog has provisionally found.
Thousands of patients are set to miss out on the drug after Concordia exploited a regulatory loophole to inflate the price by 6,000 per cent.
The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) accused the pharmaceutical company of ‘abusing’ its dominant position to ‘overcharge’ the NHS by £100million over ten years.
It said Concordia had increased the price of the treatment, called liothyronine, from £4.46 per pack in 2007 to £258.19 today, in a possible breach of competition law.
Next week NHS England is expected to confirm plans to stop providing the treatment to 13,000 patients – mostly middle-aged women – as it is too expensive.
Last year the health service spent more than £34million on liothyronine, a massive increase from just £600,000 in 2006.
The tablets are supplied on the NHS in Scotland, which is included in the UK-wide investigation. Last year the Scottish NHS spent £4.2million on the tablets.
Concordia, which is based in Canada, is now facing a fine of up to £62million 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 escape 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.
Liothyronine tablets are used to treat hypothyroidism, a condition caused by a deficiency of thyroid hormone, affecting two in 100 women and two in 1,000 men. It causes depression, tiredness and weight gain, and mainly affects those aged over 45.
Some patients can be treated with cheaper replacement hormones called thyroxine, but experts say for 15 per cent of patients liothyronine is the only effective treatment.
The CMA has the power to fine the company up to 10 per cent of its annual global turnover – £616million last year – if it finds Concordia has breached competition law. 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’. He said: ‘We will carefully consider any representations from the companies before deciding whether the law has in fact been broken.’ Lyn Mynott, chief executive of Thyroid UK, called on the Department of Health to intervene to lower the price.
She said the price of liothyronine was ‘astronomically expensive’– and in France it is available for just 10p a tablet. She added: ‘We need the Government to get together with the manufacturer and bring down the price.’
The Department of Health earlier this year introduced new laws in an attempt to stop companies exploiting the ‘debranding’ loophole after a series of similar cases.
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.’