Preemie birth preventive spikes from $10 to $1,500. This is criminal.

[mfcorey1]

It is a part of the war on women.


A drug for high-risk pregnant women has cost about $10 to $20 per injection. Next week, the price shoots up to $1,500 a dose, meaning the total cost during a pregnancy could be as much as $30,000.

That's because the drug, a form of progesterone given as a weekly shot, has been made cheaply for years, mixed in special pharmacies that custom-compound treatments that are not federally approved

http://www.ajc.com/health/preemie-birth-preventive-spikes-866617.html

[sinkingfeeling]

1. No, it's the 'free market' in America. Research & development costs paid for with public $ and then

Big Pharm gets exclusive 'rights' to the drug and can ask any amount of money for it. I found this out a few years ago when I needed to by XALATAN to fight my dog's glaucoma. Costs pennies to make, was developed with public money. A tiny bottle which lasted us for only 19 days cost over $89 in the USA. I imported it from Canada for less than half.


http://www.cptech.org/ip/health/econ/govrnd.html
"The Chinoin-Pharmacia partnership has been a profitable one. Chinoin is making a 50 percent return on its prostaglandin investment, company officials said. And Pharmacia pays Chinoin slightly more than $5 million a year for the manufacturing of latanaprost, said Tibor Szabo, who directs the prostaglandin business unit at Chinoin.

That amounts to roughly one one-hundredth of Xalatan's $507 million in annual sales last year. Or, to put it another way, the cost of making the key ingredient is just 1 percent of the revenue Xalatan generates."

[ThomCat]

2. There is NO WAY Someone Didn't See This Coming.

This price increase is precisely why this company bid on being the sole supplier for this drug. Duh! Why else do you think they did it? Why else would Anyone Intelligent think they bid on this?

Wasn't Anyone Awake when they were bidding on this?

Wasn't Anyone Awake when someone had the bright idea to put this out to bid to begin with?

This was the obvious reason, and the only possible outcome that anyone could have possibly expected as a positive outcome from any corporate perspective. They were only ever going to look at the bottom line!

If this isn't the result they wanted, they should never have put this out for bid as a sole-supplier contract! :grr: