Home ›› 13 Dec 2021 ›› World Biz
The pharmaceutical industry is targeting vulnerable Americans with predatory pricing that is forcing them to ration life-saving drugs, according to a three-year congressional probe released Friday.
Investigators focused on 10 drugmakers they accuse of raising prices for common brand-name drugs by nearly four times the rate of inflation over the past five years. “The committee’s investigation has pulled back the curtain on drug companies’ unfair, unjustified, always-increasing drug prices,” congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, who led the probe, said at a press conference.
Drug pricing has vexed politicians for years in the United States, which has the highest annual health expenditure of any industrialized country, at around $11,000 per capita, with pharmaceuticals playing a major role.
The 269-page report by the House Oversight Committee’s majority Democrats offers what Maloney described as a “rare glimpse” into the tactics of the world’s most profitable drugmakers.
For 12 medications the committee examined, the manufacturers raised prices more than 250 times in the five years from 2016, it said -- as their chief executives pocketed paychecks totaling almost $800 million.
Mindy Salango, a diabetic and patient advocate from Morgantown, West Virginia, said she had been reduced to arranging clandestine meetings to give patients otherwise unaffordable insulin.
“We’re not criminals, and we’re meeting in parking lots like we’re criminals. This isn’t health care. This is survival of the richest,” the campaigner, who pays about $350 a month for her insulin, told reporters.
