Pharmaceutical companies are crooks!

Pangea Reunited, ASN, RN · Dec 4, 2015

I wouldn't sell my house for $200,000 if someone were willing to pay me $800,000 for it ...and I wouldn't work for $20.00 an hour when someone's willing to pay me $46.00 an hour. People are often seen as "greedy" for doing the same things we all do.

allnurses Guide · Dec 5, 2015

Pharmaceutical companies in my opinion are a great argument against the pure "free market" or libertarian viewpoint. I tend toward a non-regulated business environment in general, and I understand the front-loading costs of developing new drugs, I still find them engaging in unethical practices.

SubSippi · Dec 5, 2015

I wouldn't sell my house for $200,000 if someone were willing to pay me $800,000 for it ...and I wouldn't work for $20.00 an hour when someone's willing to pay me $46.00 an hour. People are often seen as "greedy" for doing the same things we all do.

People would pay $100 for a bottle of water if that was the only way to get it.

rnmaybe · Dec 5, 2015

Do you work in a hospital or health care facility? What about when your hospital gets a drug for $10 and bills the patient 20-50x that amount. Do you have a problem with that?

A friend's sister is newly pregnant and is having pretty bad morning sickness. She was telling my friend about a medication her OB prescribed her and she learned it's about $100/pill! Luckily, her insurance covers it, though.
The drug? Diclegis. What is Diclegis, you ask? It's effin' Vitamin B6 and Unisom! Both things you can buy OTC, big bottle, for less than $10.
But some pharmaceutical company gave it a fancy name and put a silhouette of a pregnant woman on the pill, and now they can charge $100 a pill??
CROOKS, I tell you!

Dogen · Dec 5, 2015

Personally I am happy companies can charge whatever they want for their products. If you don't like their product or how much it costs, don't buy it. Be an informed consumer, like in all things.

I'm not sure how reasonable this is. I went to nursing school, then graduate school, to gain my knowledge of pharmacology. The argument has been made that from a philosophical perspective it's impossible to be an informed consumer of healthcare without being medically trained. Usually this argument is made about end of life care, for instance in the "doctors die differently" scenario. But it seems apropos here. Knowing that selegiline PO has different interactions and food restrictions than than the Emsam patch is not the sort of thing patients would even know to look for... and it's why we exist. If pharmacology were easy, or the information easy to find, people wouldn't need pharmacists and nurses and physicians to do teaching.

klone, MSN, RN · Dec 5, 2015

Do you work in a hospital or health care facility? What about when your hospital gets a drug for $10 and bills the patient 20-50x that amount. Do you have a problem with that?

Of course I do, but that's not what this thread was about.

FWIW, the facility I work for is an FQHC, so we regularly "write off" medications and give them to patients for free. And because most of our patients are destitute and a $5 prescription copay means not eating, we're pretty savvy about medication work-arounds. So you're barking up the wrong tree.

springchick1, ADN, RN · Dec 5, 2015

I was prescribed Duexis once by my doc. The pharmacist told me before he filled it hat it was going to be $512 for 30 pills because it was a new drug and insurance wouldn't cover it. You know what it is? 800 mg of ibuprofen and 26 mg famotidine. So I just started taking that combo together. I did tell my doc how much it was and he was horrified!

AnnieOaklyRN, BSN, RN, EMT-P · Dec 5, 2015

Hi,

I am definitely not on the side of the pharmaceutical companies, BUT.... remember it cost the hundreds of thousands of dollars to get a medication from the lab to your home!

I know this medication was a combination of previously used medication, but I bet the still had to go through the FDA testing process.

In the US as a whole we have become dependent on medications because we cannot tolerate the littlest of symptoms in some cases, so we have become slaves to the pharmaceutical companies, because instead of exercising 30 minutes a day we would rather take a pill for HTN, a pill for depression (or pills), a pill for high cholesterol, a pill for our knee pain which is the result of obesity and a sedentary lifestyle, a pill for our back ache, a pill for our diabetes that was caused by over eating and lack of exercise (I am talking type II of course)... you get the picture. The only people we have to blame for over priced medications are ourselves!

Annie

elkpark · Dec 5, 2015

Hi,
I am definitely not on the side of the pharmaceutical companies, BUT.... remember it cost the hundreds of thousands of dollars to get a medication from the lab to your home!

Yeah, that's the argument that always gets made in defense of Big Pharma. However, the pharmaceutical companies are currently spending as much on marketing and advertising each year as they do on research and development. They could just stop advertising rx drugs to the general public (which many of us think is a horrible idea to begin with), and they'd have plenty of money for R&D without extorting sick people.

Also, they manage to get along just fine, and continue to make massive profits, while charging the rest of the world a fraction of what US consumers pay for the same medication. If they can make a living charging 1/3 the price in Canada and Europe, they can charge 1/3 less here, too, and maybe make not quite such humongous profits. Forbes just recently reported that (once again) the pharmaceutical industry is the most profitable industry in the US (as it is on the entire planet). To me, there's something v. wrong with that.

"To find the most profitable industries, FORBES took a look at the forecasted 2015 net margin of 19 major U.S. sectors. With a 21% net profit margin, healthcare technology tops the list as the most profitable industry ... While healthcare technology has always been one of the most lucrative sectors, its net margin has been steadily on the rise along with the industry's top line (revenue), as shown in the chart below. Within the broader healthcare technology category, the superstars of profitability go to major and generic pharmaceutical companies ..."

Forbes Welcome

blondy2061h, MSN, RN · Dec 5, 2015

I was prescribed Duexis once by my doc. The pharmacist told me before he filled it hat it was going to be $512 for 30 pills because it was a new drug and insurance wouldn't cover it. You know what it is? 800 mg of ibuprofen and 26 mg famotidine. So I just started taking that combo together. I did tell my doc how much it was and he was horrified!

And that 26mg is key, because there's no way the 20mg of famotidone you could buy OTC would be in any way similar.

rnmaybe · Dec 5, 2015

In other words your facility is able to write off these things because you are subsidized by the tax payers. Your not writing off anything because you also received better reimbursement through medicare and medicaid.

Of course I do, but that's not what this thread was about.
FWIW, the facility I work for is an FQHC, so we regularly "write off" medications and give them to patients for free. And because most of our patients are destitute and a $5 prescription copay means not eating, we're pretty savvy about medication work-arounds. So you're barking up the wrong tree.

elkpark · Dec 5, 2015

And that 26mg is key, because there's no way the 20mg of famotidone you could buy OTC would be in any way similar.

Well, it would be similar in the sense that there's not a huge difference between 20 mg and 26 mg ... Do you think that the extra 6 mg is going to be the difference between the medication helping and not helping? Maybe 20 mg isn't the optimal dosage, but it's pretty close and, frankly, for >$500 for a month's supply, I'd take 20 mg or 30 mg (tablet plus half a tablet) daily of the generic formulation. Maybe I'm just being paranoid, but I firmly believe that one of the reasons the pharmaceutical companies come up with weird dosages like 26 mg tablets when the generic formulations are widely available in 20 mg tablets is just to justify charging $500 for a month's supply of the combination tablets.