“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”, Clinton said in a statement released by her campaign.
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“It’s wrong when drug companies put profits ahead of patients, with unjustified price increases not for new innovations, but for long-available and generic treatments”, Clinton’s campaign said in a statement on her website.
Competition within the drug industry appears sometimes to have effects that are counterintuitive even increasing prices of drugs, therefore what will be counted as a fair amount of overall competition.
Stringer noted that the comptroller’s office and the city pension funds have “consistently opposed the company’s pay practices, voting against its pay plan at the past four annual meetings”. Bernie Sanders all rallied behind a plan to loosen import rules on pharmaceutical drugs and in September 2015, Sanders introduced a bill in the Senate to that effect.
Calling it a “troubling trend”, Clinton singled out companies like Mylan and Turing that do not pay to develop a medication, but later purchase the rights to it and jack up the price.
Mylan’s stock is still in free fall, dropping more than 17% in the last month.
Mylan is the latest in a string of pharmaceutical companies drawing scrutiny over steep price increases, with drug executive Martin Shkreli and representatives from Valeant Pharmaceuticals International Inc. called before Congress this year.
Under Clinton’s plan, a “dedicated group” of officials from health and safety federal agencies would be formed and tasked “with protecting consumers from outlier price increases”.
The plan “is populist, a nod to the Sanders left”, Terry Haines, an analyst at Evercore ISI, said in a note to clients.
If the panel concluded that the price increase was not justified, it could respond in a number of ways, from directly intervening to make treatments available to the public from alternative manufacturers to imposing stiff fines and penalties on the offending drug company to try to force a price rollback. Although the wait time has shortened, there is often not enough consistent demand for manufacturers to enter the US market, Kesselheim said.
“Having the government get involved as a long-term purchaser of these products creates a stockpile to stabilize the market”, Kesselheim said.
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The issue of drug price hikes came to the fore again recently when news surfaced that the price of Mylan Pharmaceuticals’ two-pack of EpiPens has soared, rising from approximately $100 in 2009 to around $600 and more today, according to medical literature and various pharmacies nationwide.
