Harvoni’s launch brought new howls about price gouging from insurers and a broad coalition of health care groups. They warn that the drugs, no matter how revolutionary, are ultimately unaffordable given the estimated 3 million Americans who may be infected with hepatitis C.
Now that the FDA has approved the Harvoni treatment from Gilead Sciencesand a $94,500 price for a 12-week regimen has been established, attention is turning toward AbbVie and the steps the big drug maker must take to win market share.
60 Minutes, the most successful news program in American history, just took aim at the extraordinarily high ($100,000 per patient per year) prices charged for cancer drugs. The pharmaceutical industry, which only provided canned statements and badly thought-out explanation via the president of its lobbying group, came off looking callous and insensitive. Here’s what 60 […]
In an effort to blunt the high price of hepatitis C treatments, France plans to selectively tax drug makers when the total cost of their medicines exceeds a certain amount each year, according to Reuters. The government says a “progressive contribution scheme” has been designed to ensure all patients can access new and more effective treatments, while […]
Winston Churchill famously described an appeaser as “one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.” Today, in a very different context, his remark captures the plight of the American pharmaceutical industry.
After recording the best launch of any drug in history, it looks like the pace is starting to slow down for Gilead Sciences’ Sovaldi — the new $84,000 hepatitis C cure that’s sparking a new focus on specialty drug costs.
Gilead should be commended for taking action to make their best-selling treatment for Hepatitis C, Sovaldi, available to more people around the world. In India, they’ve struck licensing agreements with generic firms to produce the product for pennies on the dollar. Unfortunately, Gilead’s largess is being funded largely on the backs of American families.
Over the last several months there has been a ‘plateau and downward trend’ in the use of Gilead Sciences Inc’s controversial $1,000-a-pill hepatitis C treatment, Sovaldi, a CVS Health Corp analysis showed.
Gilead announced that it had struck agreements with seven Indian generic drug makers to sell lower-cost versions of its $1,000-a-pill Hepatitis C drug in poorer countries. The deals are intended to provide greater access to the medicine Sovaldi for most of the nearly 180 million infected worldwide with Hepatitis C who do not live in rich countries. Some 350,000 people die every year of Hepatitis C infections, most of them in middle- and low-income nations.
Runaway drug pricing has become a recent hot topic, witnessed best by the media and political bashing of Gilead Sciences (GILD_) for the $1,000-per-day cost of its hepatitis C pill Sovaldi.