Generic Greed Bilks Generic Cancer Drug

Generics were supposed to lower prices but in some “specialty” cases greed appears to be driving pharma companies to BILK insurance companies & consumers as if Dooms Day is upon us, says WSJ research.

For instance, notes the newspaper, “The cancer drug Gleevec went generic in 2016 & can be bought today for as little as $55 a month. But many patients’ insurance plans are paying more than 100 TIMES that.” CVS Health & Cigna are charging “$6,600 a month or more for Gleevec prescriptions. They are able to do that because they set the prices with pharmacies, which they sometimes own.” Hello? In much of the east coast & Midwest, there seems to be a CVS pharmacy on every other block. As a result, the WSJ research suggests, expensive medicine that patients rely on runs out, the lower-cost copies are supposed to give big savings, not big price hikes. Not to pick on CVS & Cigna, but lets: “Across a selection of these so-called specialty generic drugs, Cigna & CVS’s prices were at least 24 TIMES HIGHER ON AVERAGE than roughly what the medicines’ manufacturers charge.” Prices at UnitedHealth Group, which also owns a large health insurer, were 3.5 times as much, according to data compiled separately by non-profit 46brooklyn Research.

WSJ concludes: “The hefty price tags are undermining the benefits of generics – a pillar of efforts to control Americans’ spiraling health care spending – while saddling patients, many on fixed incomes & insured by Medicare, with considerable deductible payments or other out-of-pocket costs.”

Davd Soul