Generic Medicines Used to be Cheap… Not Any More
By Noel Brinkerhoff and Steve Straehley | AllGov | August 12, 2015
Disappearing are the days of going to the pharmacy and asking for a generic version of a drug and expecting it to cost a lot less than its name brand equivalent. Consolidation in the generic drug industry has allowed manufacturers to raise prices dramatically.
Only two years ago, the cost of the antibiotic tetracycline in generic form was only $1.50 for pharmacies, according to Steve Hendricks at Truthout. But by 2014, the same drug cost $257.70 … a 17,080% increase. Another antibiotic, doxycycline, went from costing $1.20 to $111 in just six months. That’s an increase of 9,150%.
One of the big players in the generic field is Israeli company Teva Pharmaceuticals. Teva has bought up competitors and as it has done so, it has raised its prices. The company now controls 22% of the generic market.
Teva even bought a name-brand manufacturer, Cephalon, and in doing so became liable to pay a $1.2 billion fine for paying generic companies to give up their rights to manufacture a drug after patent protection expires. “Pay for delay” lets a drug’s originator keep its monopoly longer. Its drug Provigil went from $166 for a month’s supply to $1,001.
Hendricks also cited data from Medicare and Medicaid that showed from July 2013 to July 2014, “the price of half of all generics went up, and nearly 10 percent of them went up by double or more,” he wrote. Among that 10%, the average increase was 448%.
Something that would help cut costs would be giving the federal government the right to negotiate Medicare Part D drug prices. President George W. Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress inexplicably gave up that right when the law was passed in 2003.
To Learn More:
The Rise of Big Generic: Why Knockoff Prescriptions Now Cost $1,200 (by Steve Hendricks, Truthout )
How High? The Backlash Over Rising Prescription Drug Prices Gains Steam (by Ed Silverman, Wall Street Journal )
CVS Health Accused in Suit of Overcharging for Generic Drugs (by Michael Hytha, Bloomberg )
This Hepatitis C Drug, Developed with U.S. Government-Funded Research, Costs $300 per Treatment Course in India… and $84,000 in the U.S. (by Noel Brinkerhoff and Steve Straehley, AllGov )
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From the Archives
The Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki Were War Crimes Too
By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | March 24, 2022
President Biden is accusing Russian forces in Ukraine of committing war crimes by engaging in brutal attacks on civilians. What he is referring to is a longtime principle of warfare in which military forces battle military forces and do not knowingly target civilians with death and destruction.
Meanwhile, the media is reporting that Russian forces are becoming increasingly stalemated on the battlefield, unable to complete their conquest of Ukraine and effect the regime change that they seek within the Ukrainian government. If Russia fails in its effort to bring regime change to Ukraine, that would enable Ukraine to be absorbed into NATO, the corrupt dinosauric bureaucratic entity from the old Cold War racket. That, in turn, would enable the Pentagon to achieve its goal of installing its nuclear missiles pointed at Russia along Russia’s border.
WIth the relentless pressure that the U.S. government and its NATO cohorts are putting on Putin, including with sanctions that are designed to kill Russian civilians, a question must be asked: If Putin’s back is to the wall, if Russia is faced with defeat in Ukraine, if the Russian economy is disintegrating, if the Russian people are faced with death by starvation or massive impoverishment, and if the Russian government is close to collapsing, would Putin resort to dropping a nuclear bomb on Kiev in order to bring a quick end to the war?
If he were to do so, there is no doubt what the response of U.S. officials, the mainstream press, and American statists would be. They would exclaim, and rightly so, that Russia had just committed a massive war crime by targeting and killing a massive number of civilians with a nuclear bomb.
But there would be one big problem staring U.S. officials and the mainstream press, along with American statists, in the face: The U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which knowingly and intentionally targeted, killed, and injured an untold number of Japanese civilians during World War II.
Ever since those bombings, U.S. officials, the U.S. mainstream press, and American statists have maintained that the bombings were justified because they “shortened the war.” Their argument has always been that the lives of thousands of American soldiers were saved by bringing about a quick surrender by Japan. … continue
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