It looks like the pill profit party is over for drug companies. Bestselling pills like Lipitor, Seroquel, Zyprexa, Singular, Concerta, Cymbalta, and Abilify have gone off patent and Wall Street is moving on to industries that offer better returns.
To combat investor disenchantment, drug companies have rolled out expensive drugs that treat rare conditions. If you are sleepy during the day, you may have narcolepsy said Jazz Pharmaceuticals, a condition its drug Xyrem treats for $35,000 per year. If you have frequent diarrhea, gas, and bloating, you may have exocrine pancreatic insufficiency states the company AbbVie, which can be helped by its drug Creon.
Drug makers are not above scaring the populace if it will sell drugs for rare diseases. Your back pain may not be from working out at all but from a disease called ankylosing spondylitis, says AbbVie, a condition that can be treated with its biologic drug Humira for as much as $20,000 a year. (Injectable “biologic” drugs are a new drug industry push because they are so expensive and less susceptible to generic competition than pills.)
The drug industry is also trying to stay a Wall Street darling with new, overpriced drugs—notably hepatitis C drugs. Gilead Sciences sold $12.4 billion worth of hepatitis C drug Sovaldi at $1,000 a pill last year, reported the New York Times, “straining the budgets of insurance companies and Medicaid programs.”
While drug company representatives initially tried to cast the outrageous prices as recouping their research and development costs they quickly back pedaled into admitting the drugs are priced on “value”—what they are “worth” for the patient’s health. Needless to say such valuations come pretty close to the definition of extortion—or offers you “can’t refuse.”
