Over the past six months, the company, which is one of the world’s largest purveyors of generic medicines, raised prices more than 20 percent on two dozen products. And Mylan also boosted prices by more that 100 percent on seven other products, according to Wells Fargo analyst David Maris, who called some of the price hikes “exceptionally large.”Mylan's spokestroll basically said "hey, we're not jacking up all of the prices." Which is like a bank robber saying that he didn't take all of the money.
For instance, he cited a 542 percent increase for ursodiol, a generic medicine used to treat gallstones. There was also a 444 percent increase for metoclopramide, a generic drug that treats gastroesophageal reflux disease; and a 400 percent boost in the price for dicyclomine, which combats irritable bowel syndrome. Mylan also raised the price of its tolterodine overactive bladder drug, one of its biggest products in the United States, by 56 percent.
(H/T)
I wondered what they were doing with the rest of their generics portfolio. Now we know, I guess.
ReplyDeleteThis is all enabled by unprecedented consolidation in the drug manufacturing marketplace. Now three companies, #1 Teva (which just bought former #3 Allergan), #2 Sandoz (which has close relationships with Mylan -- Mylan manufactures some of their generics), and of course #3 Mylan, own 54% of the generics market worldwide -- and probably 80% of the generics market here in the United States due to tighter FDA regulation of generics that make it hard for companies like, say, Cipla, to compete here (as versus in India and Southeast Asia). When you have three companies with such market domination, they don't really compete in a traditional market sense anymore -- it's a case of oligopoly where the barriers to entry are higher than the profits that could be made entering the market once the oligopolies drop their price of drugs down to drive the newcomer out of business, using the profits from their other drugs to subsidize that.
We're at the point where new companies simply won't enter the market, because they would not be able to out-compete the established incumbents due to the ability of the established incumbents to cross-subsidize for long enough to drive new companies out of business. The smaller generics companies are scrambling to consolidate because that's the only thing that'll give them the horizontal scale to take on the Big 3, but all that'll end up with is us having a Big 4 instead -- hardly what is needed to keep the generics market competitive.
It's another era of robber barons. Instead of Big Oil and Big Rail, we have Big Pharma. The tactics are the same: Charge the maximum that the customer will bear and engage in predatory pricing to drive out competitors.
ReplyDeleteThe fact that, only now, Mylan {spit on floor} is introducing a "cheaper" generic is enough to make one throw up on one's mouth.