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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 13086

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

 

Publication type: news

Drug Makers Increased Prices By Average Of 7.4% In 2007 For Medications Most Commonly Prescribed To Elderly, AARP Study Finds
Medical News Today 2008 Mar 6
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/99617.php


Full text:

Drug prices for brand-name medications most commonly prescribed to the elderly increased by an average of 7.4% in 2007 — about two-and-a-half times the rate of inflation, according to an AARP study released on Wednesday, the AP/Contra Costa Times reports. For the study, AARP tracked wholesale drug prices of 220 brand-name medications. According to the study, prices increased for all but four drugs in 2007, with most exceeding the rate of general inflation. The drug with the largest price increase — 27.7% — was Sanofi-Aventis’ sleep aid Ambien, while the price of Merck’s cholesterol drug Zocor did not change.

According to AARP, which has tracked drug prices since 2002, wholesale prices for drugs have increased since the Medicare prescription drug benefit began on Jan. 1, 2006. In the four years before the benefit began, wholesale drug prices increased by between 5.3% and 6.6% annually, AARP said. Organization officials say the public outcry over prescription drug prices diminished after the drug benefit took effect because the government was covering most of the cost for beneficiaries’ drugs. AARP Policy Director John Rother said, “Unfortunately, many manufacturers have taken the absence of an outcry as a green light to go ahead and raise prices even more.”

The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America said the study does not reflect the true amounts consumers pay for drugs, nor does it account for generic drugs, which have slowed the growth in drug prices. According to PhRMA Senior Vice President Ken Johnson, since 2000, prescription drug prices have increased at a slower rate than overall medical inflation. Johnson said federal government figures showing a 3.7% annual increase in medicines versus a 4.3% increase for overall medical inflation are more accurate because they include brand-name and generic drugs, which represent what “consumers actually buy — rather than the few selectively highlighted by AARP” (Freking, AP/Contra Costa Times, 3/5).

 

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Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909