Drug price hikes harm patients, experts testify

Senate testimony spotlights pricing, lack of competition for medications

Steep price hikes for some off- patent drugs harm patients by restricting access to potential life- saving medications, health care and health insurance experts testified at a congressional hearing Wednesday.

Responding to outrage from doctors and patients, the Senate Special Committee on Aging focused on supply problems that occur when patents on medications expire and the drug rights are sold to new pharmaceutical companies that raise prices by as much as 6000%.

Committee members raised the prospect of adding new pricing rules to the existing U. S. drug oversight system.

“That balance we have struck never anticipated companies acquiring off- patent drugs and then jacking up their prices to enormous heights, and do so, as one executive essentially put it, ‘ because I can,’ ” said committee chairwoman Sen. Susan Collins, R- Maine.

A COMMITTEE PROBE FOUND: Costs for two heart drugs owned by drugmaker Valeant Pharmacueticals International increased the Cleveland Clinic’s total drug budget by $ 8.6 million, hearing testimony showed.

North Carolina doctors treating a baby for toxoplasmosis couldn get the Daraprim drug that targets the parasitic disease because Turing Pharmaceuticals had raised the price 40 times over the original cost.

A price hike from $ 44 to $ 2,700 forced the University of Utah Health System to keep a Valeant heart drug locked up and remove it from medication carts where previously it was available.

Valeant said “broad conclusions about the company’s pricing can not be drawn from any one drug or set of drugs.”

Turing said it is “committed to patient access” and to developing therapies “for rare and neglected diseases.”

Sen. Claire McCaskill, D- Mo., the committee’s ranking minority member, said the committee’s continuing investigation had found a pharmaceutical industry “market failure.”