The chorus has been growing for months and now it’s official: Americans across the political spectrum agree that prescription prices are too high. The drug industry could hardly have done a better job uniting the country.
A new poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation finds that 72 percent of Americans believe drug costs are “unreasonable.” And in a sign of real trouble for the drug industry, 83 percent say they favor giving the government the power to negotiate Medicare drug pricing.
How did it come to this? Rampant profiteering. And the drug industry has shown a surprisingly tin ear to the fallout, choosing to fall back on the tired trope of high R&D costs. Nobody’s buying that anymore given the staggering earnings enjoyed by pharmaceutical companies lately. A prime example: Gilead Sciences, maker of the high-cost hepatitis drug Sovaldi, posted profits of $4.5 billion for the second quarter.
As a result, pricing transparency bills have cropped up in state legislatures from California to New York. While drug industry lobbyists rush to stamp these out, 118 leading oncologists recently decried unsustainable chemo prices in a commentary in the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings.
“There is no relief in sight because drug companies keep challenging the market with even higher prices,” say the oncologists. “This raises the question of whether current pricing of cancer drugs is based on reasonable expectation of return on investment or whether it is based on what prices the market can bear.”
The 340B program was created in a similar environment of drug price increases and it remains as important today as when it was made law in 1992. Safety-net providers depend on the program to keep pharmaceutical costs under control and to provide invaluable health services to their communities.