A good friend of mine suffers from gout and has been taking colchicine for years. The drug has been prescribed since before the FDA even existed. It used to be pennies per pill.
He goes to get his refill last night and actually heard his pharmacist say “shit” from the back room. She comes out and says, “You’re not going to like this”. The FDA just awarded exclusive rights to the centuries old drug to URL Pharma, who immediately bumped the price to over $5 per pill. His prescription that used to be $20 for a 90 day supply is now over $450 a month, $120/month after insurance.
URL Pharma was one that went for that easy money guaranteed by the FDA. It commissioned studies that confirmed its colchicine product’s safety and efficacy, which seems sorta of silly for a producte that has demonstrated its effectiveness for 1500 years. After 17 clinical trials involving almost a 1000 persons, trials determined colchicine should be taken at a lower dose was typically prescribed adn identified those drugs that should not be mixed with it. Receiving FDA approval, the company began marketing its colchicine drug as Colcrys. Now possessing government granted monopoly pricing power URL Pharma raised the price of a pill from pennies to $5 each.
This is why healthcare is so expensive in the US, and why reasonable people refuse to support government healthcare until the government does something to bring costs under control.
Yup, shits fucked. A little OT but the Older woman who lives in the apartment below mine told me yesterday during a discussion “can you believe that soon you will have to get a prescription from a doctor just to by aspirin?” lol, she then went on to blame it on all those kids doing drugs.
I think what bothers me most is how much I had to dig to even find that WSJ article. Why are none of the major media outlets picking up on stuff like this? CNN and Fox both felt the need to update me about how Palin’s kid is doing on DWTS and about how some prince that as an American I don’t give a shit about is engaged, but neither has anything about this drug company ripoff.
Should we assume this was a hypothetical question? I literally have watched FOXNEWS have some old doctor on there bashing natural cures then a while later see commercials for drugs. It is scary that the sponsors control waht is supposed to be news.
The FDA is one of if not the most corrupt entities on the planet.
as long as you remember to put more money in the envelope with the letter than big pharma did with their letter you’ll have a good chance of getting something done.
lol it’s not time to abandon ship. We can still fix this bitch.
But yeah, the FDA was broke so they were given a mandate to pass on the cost of qualifying drugs that predate modern FDA approval processes to the private sector. Apparently they did that by giving this pharma company a 3 year patent once they completed the tests necessary for modern FDA qualification. I wouldn’t call it appallingly evil, but evidence of a terrible system with appallingly evil results.
I wonder what would happen if we privatized the FDA? Let a private company give a private “Fry’s Drug Lab Seal of Approval” to drug companies who can provide sufficient evidence for Fry, then let the consumer decide whether or not to only buy Fry-approved drugs. If Fry approves something that turns out to be bad then they bear the risk and people can sue, but the cost of the lawsuit gets passed right back to consumers the next time they want a Fry approved drug? Or they lose faith in Fry and Jay’s Approvals gain marketshare? I dunno. Crazy talk. The private sector can’t possibly monitor their own drugs. The next thing you know you’ll tell me that the people can govern themselves. Crazy talk!
Now where did I put that libertarian party signup sheet…
First people need to understand that the FDA is not there for approval, they are there for control.
Telling natural cures they can’t make claims is not “approval” it is “control” to protect big pharma sales.
