Doctors want lower medicine drug prices, too…
“ Prescription drug prices in America are through the roof, and they’re still going up.
Consumers spent $374 billion on medicine in 2014, according to the IMS Institute for Healthcare. That’s 13 percent more than the previous year.
Hepatitis C drugs alone accounted for more than $11 billion in new spending last year. Perhaps that is no surprise, as the drugs Sovaldi and Harvoni both cost more than $1,000 per pill.
Scientific American reports that the average price of a new cancer drug now exceeds $100,000 a year. Even a cancer patient with insurance could spend $25,000 out of pocket.
And then there are people like Turing Pharmaceuticals’ Chief Executive Officer Martin Shkreli — aka “Pharma Bro” — whose apparent greed in raising the price of a lifesaving drug by 5,000 percent has infuriated the public. Shkreli was arrested Thursday morning on security fraud charges stemming from when he was a hedge fund manager and overseeing the biopharmaceutical company Retrophin.
Even generics are getting pricey…
With all of this going on, you may ask: Why are drug prices so high?
The answer isn’t as simple as you might think. Is corporate greed a factor? Yes, but experts say it’s a bit more complicated than that “…
… continue reading Why some drugs cost so huch and others don’t, on healthline, by Jamie Reno, 17 December 2015.