Tuesday, October 20, 2015
Pharma will make you pay, one way or another
And because research has been pretty much eliminated by most pharmaceutical companies, they need to use tricks to get the big bucks. One way is to take the responsibility for fighting with the insurance company off the doctor's shoulders.
The pain reliever Duexis is a combination of two old drugs, the generic equivalents of Motrin and Pepcid.Not as sleazy as that hedge fund shit because there is an alternative. But you have to be onyour toes to know that a couple of over the counter drugs will work as well. It doesn't help you that your doctor is probably getting some kind on appealing goodie from the drug company to prescribe their overpriced junk. It is a rare doctor that has the ethics to do the right thing nowadays.
If prescribed separately, the two drugs together would cost no more than $20 or $40 a month. By contrast, Duexis, which contains both in a single pill, costs about $1,500 a month.
Needless to say, many insurers do not want to pay for Duexis. Yet sales of the drug are growing rapidly, in large part because its manufacturer, Horizon Pharma, has figured out a way to circumvent efforts of insurers and pharmacists to switch patients to the generic components, or even to the over-the-counter versions.
It is called “Prescriptions Made Easy.” Instead of sending their patients to the drugstore with a prescription, doctors are urged by Horizon to submit prescriptions directly to a mail-order specialty pharmacy affiliated with the drug company. The pharmacy mails the drug to the patient and deals with the insurance companies, relieving the doctor of the reimbursement hassle that might otherwise discourage them from prescribing such an expensive drug.
Horizon is not alone. Use of specialty pharmacies seems to have become a new way of trying to keep the health system paying for high-priced drugs. Valeant Pharmaceuticals International, which has attracted government and media scrutiny for its huge price increases, does much the same thing for its dermatology products with a specialty pharmacy called Philidor Rx Services.
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