Clinton on Friday proposed creating a group of federal watchdog agencies that would track the prices of certain medications and would impose fines for excessive hikes and rampant speculation, EFE news reported.
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The board could also allow emergency imports of similar drugs made overseas and could levy fines against companies for “unjustified price increases”.
The team’s strategies for holding down cost increases to patients would include boosting competition in the pharmaceutical sector, providing assistance in the formulation of alternative drugs, instituting penalties for unwarranted price increases and facilitating the importation of foreign medications when prudent, according to the Clinton campaign.
In its report on Clinton’s plan, Time.com said that state legislators in Pennsylvania, Ohio and four other states have introduced bills requiring companies to justify the cost of their drugs and, if necessary, “lower the prices that state health care programs pay”.
EpiPens have been available since the 1970s, but Mylan purchased the rights from Merck in 2007.
Mylan said that it plans to launch the generic product in “several weeks”, depending on when it can whip up the new labels.
Wyden, ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, and Pallone, ranking member of the House Energy & Commerce Committee, said in the letter on Friday: “It has recently come to our attention that Mylan has classified EpiPen as a generic drug” under the Medicaid rebate program, even though it is considered a new drug by the Food and Drug Administration. Recent price increases on the product have rendered it unaffordable for many, leading to a public outcry. It will continue to produce the branded version with a list price of $600 for a two-pack.
“Over the past year, we’ve seen far too many examples of drug companies raising prices excessively for long-standing, life-saving treatments with little or no new innovation or R&D”, Reuters quoted Clinton as saying in a statement. Numerous companies are examples of a “troubling trend” in which manufacturers hike prices after acquiring drugs they haven’t developed on their own.
All this, the plan says, will protect the pharmaceutical and biotech industries that “are an incredible source of American innovation and revolutionary treatments for debilitating diseases”, while punishing companies that make “unjustified” price increases of old drugs.
“But I’m ready to hold drug companies accountable when they try to put profits ahead of patients, instead of back into research and innovation”.
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The pharmaceutical industry took pains to distance itself from Shkreli, the former leader of Turing Pharmaceuticals who unapologetically hiked the price of a decades-old drug used by some AIDS and cancer patients by 5000 percent a year ago.
