Drug Cost

Older Americans were disproportionately affected by several different types of infection for which antibiotics were largely ineffective, resulting in nearly 12,000 deaths and costing the U.S. health care system almost $1.9 billion in 2017, a new study found.

Of those deaths, 40% were estimated to have occurred among those 65 years and older, while this same group of patients accounted for 41% of the associated health care costs.
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The drugmaker Regeneron funneled tens of millions of dollars to a charity that paid the out-of-pocket costs for patients who took the company’s expensive eye drug, then lied to internal auditors about it, according to a lawsuit filed Wednesday by federal prosecutors in Massachusetts.

The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts in Boston, claims that Regeneron violated federal anti-kickback laws by using the patient-assistance fund to encourage doctors to prescribe their drug, Eylea, over a less-expensive competitor.

Five drugmakers and distributors are offering $22 billion in cash as well as drugs and services they value at $28 billion to resolve lawsuits alleging the industry fueled the U.S. opioid crisis, two sources familiar with the matter said on Wednesday.

Celgene Corp has agreed to pay $55 million to resolve claims that the drugmaker engaged in an multi-faceted scheme to maintain a monopoly over the market for its cancer treatment drugs Thalomid and Revlimid and delay generic competition.

The settlement was disclosed in a filing on Wednesday in federal court in Newark, New Jersey, and would, if approved, resolve a class action brought on behalf of insurers, consumers and others who claimed they paid more for the drugs than they should have.

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A U.S. group that reviews the value of medicines issued a critical report on Novartis’s new multiple sclerosis drug Mayzent, calling its $88,561 list price “far out of line” compared with its benefits for patients.

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A bid by the Trump administration to shine light on the high costs of prescription drugs prompted legal resistance Friday by three major pharmaceutical companies.

Amgen, Eli Lilly, and Merck sued the Department of Health and Human Services in a bid to block new rules requiring that companies disclose the “list price’’ of their drugs in television advertising.

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A pair of drugmakers in India that the U.S. is counting on to produce generic blood-pressure pills after a far-reaching recall have been faulted by regulators for quality-control issues.

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In January, Columbia University revealed that four patients at its Irving Medical Center in New York had been sick with an unusual version of E. coli , a common gut bacterium. Although the news largely escaped attention in the media, it ricocheted through the world of infectious disease experts. E. coli is a relatively common bacterium and benign when it’s in the gut, where it usually lives, but in the wrong places—such as in lettuce or ground beef, or our bloodstream—it can turn deadly. When antibiotics prove ineffective against an E. coli infection, as many as half the patients with it die within two weeks.

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It is something we've all heard before: Generic drugs are the same as brand-name drugs. They contain the same active ingredients and their manufacturers are supposed to prove they work the same way as the brand-name counterparts. Many of those generics come from abroad, though, with 80 percent of active ingredients and 40 percent of finished drugs coming from outside the U.S.

But are all of those drugs manufactured overseas really the same?

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A coalition of attorneys general from 43 states and Puerto Rico claim in a federal lawsuit that generic drug manufacturers conspired to fix prices and markets of 114 drugs for both minor infections and chronic diseases such as arthritis, cancer, diabetes and HIV.

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