Martin Shkreli is in prison, but Daraprim still costs $750 per pill. Heather Bresch was hauled before Congress, but EpiPens still cost three to six times more than they did in 2007.
.. This phenomenon, what economists call “sticky pricing,” is common in pharmaceuticals. It has raised the price of drugs for serious conditions including multiple sclerosis and diabetes, even when there are multiple competing drugs.
The problem is that companies have decided it is not in their interest to compete.
.. There’s cover in numbers.
When you’re driving on the highway where a speed limits is 55 and most everyone’s going 70, you’re likely to increase your speed, too. Why should you feel bad? Why would the cop pick you? Someone else in a flashy car is probably doing 90. (For drug makers, Mr. Shkreli would be the hot-dogger who gives others cover.)
.. The parties are not really colluding. They’re not calling one another up to agree to drive too fast; no manufacturer (one hopes) is sitting at a country club agreeing to keep his prices high. This makes drug makers difficult to prosecute under racketeering or restraint of trade laws.
.. But while drug prices in America are going up, many of the same drugs are cheaper — and often coming down in price — in other developed countries, where governments step in to regulate prices.
.. Now you know why Novartis might have paid $1.2 million to Michael Cohen, the president’s personal lawyer and “fixer,” after hearing the candidate’s threats.
.. Britain’s National Health Service sets a price it is willing to pay pharmacists for medicines they dispense. The pharmacists, who are in business for themselves, can then source the medicine from any wholesaler. The cheaper they can procure the medicine, the more they profit.
Select the Worst Trump Minion
Just this week we had a top aide with multiple domestic abuse allegations, plus a chief of staff who never seemed to bother to pursue the matter. And a communications director — third one in a little over a year — who helped write the statement defending said aide, whom she happened to also be dating.
.. Tenure is irrelevant. Kirstjen Nielsen has only been secretary of homeland security for a couple of months, but we already know her as the woman who tried to support her boss by claiming she wasn’t sure whether Norway was a predominately white country.
.. Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar .. Azar’s mission is supposed to be bringing down prescription prices, and his main qualification is having run the American division of a drug company during the five years when the price of its insulin rose from $122 to $274 a vial.
.. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos .. “The bureaucracy is much more formidable and difficult than I had anticipated,” she complained.
.. Scott Pruitt, head of the Environmental Protection Agency
.. “Do we really know what the ideal surface temperature should be in the year 2100? … That’s fairly arrogant for us to think that we know exactly what it should be in 2100.”
.. Attorney General Jeff Sessions is busy pushing the federal death penalty and trying to prosecute the marijuana industry in states where grass is legal.
.. U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer is trying to dismember the World Trade Organization. Smaller minds are fascinated by reports that Lighthizer has a life-size portrait of himself hanging on the wall at home.
.. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross is in charge of the upcoming census, which is underfunded, and rumors are that the chief candidate for deputy director is a highly partisan Texas professor whose book on reapportionment is subtitled “Why Competitive Elections Are Bad for America.”
..Secretary of the Treasury Steve Mnuchin .. The new Trump nominee to lead the I.R.S. is a tax lawyer who specializes in defending wealthy clients against — yes! — the I.R.S. To cheer things up, we can go back to recalling the time Mnuchin posed with his wife, dressed in black opera gloves and a come-hither hairdo, admiring his signature on bills at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing.
Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke is well known for his enthusiasm for fossil fuel drilling. But even some of his fans were a little perplexed when he announced a policy for expanding offshore oil and gas drilling, and then abruptly added that there would be an exception for … Florida. Think it was all about Mar-a-Lago?
.. taxpayers paid $6,000 to helicopter Zinke to a critical appointment going horseback riding with Mike Pence.
Everyone Wants to Reduce Drug Prices. So Why Can’t We Do It?
The pharmaceutical and health products industries spent $145 million on lobbying for the first half of 2017, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Drug makers gave $4.5 million to congressional campaigns in that period, including six-figure donations to House Speaker Paul Ryan; Representative Greg Walden, a Republican of Oregon who heads the House Energy and Commerce Committee; and Senator Orrin Hatch, Republican of Utah and chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, a Kaiser Health News analysis found.
The drug lobby has spent $28 million so far this year to air six ads depicting heroic researchers about 4,600 times on national TV, according to iSpot.tv, an ad tracker.
The industry hired the former F.B.I. director Louis Freeh to study the impact of importation. He concluded that it would “leave the safety of the U.S. prescription drug supply vulnerable to criminals seeking to harm patients.” Import proponents argue the Food and Drug Administration could easily ensure safety by licensing and inspecting Canadian suppliers.
.. Mr. Trump’s feud with congressional Republicans, especially the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, means “you’re not going to get any strong direction or leadership out of the White House” on drug prices
The Democrats’ Agenda, and the Art of the Possible
The agenda Democrats began rolling out on Monday actually shares some ideas — job training, lowering drug prices, help for working families — with the Republicans’ stated but so far unrealized priorities.
.. Meanwhile, Mr. Trump’s campaign promise for a $1 trillion infrastructure overhaul, a job-creation effort Democrats are eager to talk about, goes nowhere.
.. And why isn’t Mr. Trump, who is counting bills to rename post offices as legislative achievements, turning to Democrats for help on initiatives they and he support?
.. Democrats want to help 10 million Americans find work by expanding paid apprenticeship and work-based job-training programs... Democrats want to give Medicare Part D the power to negotiate lower prescription drug prices for its 41 million enrollees; our deal maker in chief once thought that was a good idea, so he might want to pick up the phone... Party leaders realize, as Senator Chuck Schumer, the minority leader, wrote on Monday, that they’ve lost the last two elections in part because they “failed to articulate a strong, bold economic program for the middle class and those working hard to get there.”