Pharmaceutical companies are crooks!

[klone]

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!

[klone, MSN, RN]

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.

I fail to understand what your point is. What does this have to do with the topic?

[klone, MSN, RN]

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.

I think Blondy was being tongue-in-cheek.

[elkpark]

I think Blondy was being tongue-in-cheek.

I hope so ... :)

[kbrn2002, ADN, RN]

I wish there were a class required in high school that taught things like understanding the basics of research studies, financial common sense, and how to read labels of both food and drugs.

Case in point: ZzQuil (from company that manufacturers NyQuil and DayQuil) is an otc sleep aid that contains no pain reliever for times you just need a little help to nod off.

48 caps per pack - 2 caps per dose (each cap 25 mG) - available at Walgreens for 14.99.

Of course most of us reading this likely read the box and realize this "amazing" drug is merely diphenhydramine hcl in with a fancy (and pricey) brand name. We understand we can just ease over to the allergy aisle and purchase a store brand pack of diphenhydramine hcl 25 mG at 5.99 for 48 caps. The store brand is even buy one get one half off as I type this.

Most people probably don't think or know how to figure this out and line the pockets of the manufacturer.

Totally legal but a shame so many waste the money unnecessarily.

Perhaps a course in high school could teach people how to be more savvy consumers?

Funny that you used ZzQuil as an example. My wonderful husband, who should know better after being married to me for this long, insists that the brand name "works better" than the exact same generic drug.

Who am I to argue, if he insists this is so, for him it is so. I guess I will be forever stuck paying for the brand name. At least he has no problem using generic Tylenol, Advil and Aleve instead of the overpriced brand names.

[springchick1, ADN, RN]

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

Yep! But I was happy taking the 20mg. Much much cheaper.

[Asystole RN]

Drug pricing and big pharma” are always a hot topic and people assume the high prices are outright theft.

What a lot of people do not realize is that companies that develop and market a medication only have a limited window to exclusively sell that medication before the market opens up to other manufacturers. Many times the patent, which is issued for 20 years, can expire soon after or even BEFORE the medication is granted FDA approval. The FDA can grant exclusivity to market a drug, which is different from a patent, but those exclusivity rights only last for 3-7 years depending.

That means that a drug company not only has to recoup its research and development costs in that time but also turn a profit for their share holders.

The reason we have amazing drugs that are treating conditions that used to be fatal just a few years ago is because drug companies have investors that are willing to literally pay hundreds of millions of dollars to develop them. The investors are not just some shady billionaire or hedge fund owner but the investors are your parent's investments, your mutual funds, your retirement funds.

Wishes and good thoughts do not pay for research. Investors do not invest for happy, happy, joy, joy. They invest to turn a profit.

Fortunately the exclusive rights to make that drug only last a certain amount of years before it is released to the public.

Remove the ability for that company to make their investors a profit for a limited amount of time and you kill research and innovation.

[Asystole RN]

Nurses as a whole have no clue as to what it costs to research, develop, and then bring a product to market, let alone a drug.

I work on the medical device side of the industry which is MUCH less expensive but we spend on average $500,000 a year in legal maintenance for each and every one of our products. That is just maintenance. For each product we bring to market it costs about $5-$15,000,000 JUST TO GET IT THROUGH THE FDA, and our products do not even have to get 510K approval!

I am proud to say that my company is an American company and we research, develop, and manufacturer our products in the United States, like a lot of pharma companies in fact. The problem is that we have to pay a researcher in Kansas US wages, a chemist in Texas US wages, and the engineer in Washington US wages. Since we manufacturer in the United States we have to pay US manufacturing wages.

Everyone wants China prices but not get China quality while keeping jobs in the US that pay US wages.

[caliotter3]

I wish there were a class required in high school that taught things like understanding the basics of research studies, financial common sense, and how to read labels of both food and drugs.

Case in point: ZzQuil (from company that manufacturers NyQuil and DayQuil) is an otc sleep aid that contains no pain reliever for times you just need a little help to nod off.

48 caps per pack - 2 caps per dose (each cap 25 mG) - available at Walgreens for 14.99.

Of course most of us reading this likely read the box and realize this "amazing" drug is merely diphenhydramine hcl in with a fancy (and pricey) brand name. We understand we can just ease over to the allergy aisle and purchase a store brand pack of diphenhydramine hcl 25 mG at 5.99 for 48 caps. The store brand is even buy one get one half off as I type this.

Most people probably don't think or know how to figure this out and line the pockets of the manufacturer.

Totally legal but a shame so many waste the money unnecessarily.

Perhaps a course in high school could teach people how to be more savvy consumers?

Granddaughter two years out of high school. We had this conversation about Zzquil and Benadryl (generic). She did not believe me when I pointed out to her that the same words were printed on both packages along with the very same dosages in mg. I got tired of the argument, but refused to pay for the expensive version.

[OldPhatMC]

What your paying for is for someone to put the medications together and test them for risk to pregnant women. You're paying for someone else to take the fall in case of a birth defect. If a doc were to just say "take B-6 and Unisom" for an off-label reason, the doc becomes responsible for anything that happens to babby.

[blondy2061h, MSN, RN]

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.

I forgot to use the sarcasm font.

[blondy2061h, MSN, RN]

I think Blondy was being tongue-in-cheek.

Yes, exactly.

[nursel56]

]

Drug pricing and big pharma” are always a hot topic and people assume the high prices are outright theft.

What a lot of people do not realize is that companies that develop and market a medication only have a limited window to exclusively sell that medication before the market opens up to other manufacturers.

I'm pretty sure that is common knowledge, but here is something I wonder about . how a pharmaceutical company decides where to focus their research efforts? It's noble to formulate cancer cures etc., but what percentage of their research dollars go into things like Lyrica for fibromyalgia and other things that are fairly obviously pursued because of the cash cow factor?

Do you think a pharmaceutical company might lobby behind the scenes to get a cheap over-the-counter asthma med taken off the market because there is no profit if people use that cheap but effective OTC inhaler?

Then there is the Texas Gardisil deal. . .

I worked for a government doctor who was also given a pile of money to run clinical trials while they are also paid on the taxpayer's dime, so to speak. Maybe things have changed but those budgets were very often mixed together, making it difficult to say what part of the doctor's paycheck actually came from one or the other.

I'm not intending to demonize either side, just be realistic.