The "Me-Too" Drug Rip-Off

[Donnachaidh]

http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Me-Too-Drug-Rip-Off-by-Dr-Stuart-Jeanne-B-110514-761.html

In addition to the billions of health care dollars drug companies waste on disease mongering -- convincing the public that everyday human problems are actually illnesses requiring treatment -- billions more are wasted on developing and marketing hundreds of "me-too" drugs. By definition, a "me-too" or "copycat" drug is a very slight variation of an existing drug that is already on the market. The main downside of me-too drugs is that they are a primary factor in skyrocketing health care costs, which in turn, are the main reason hundreds of thousands of Americans can't afford to see a doctor when they are ill. Other drawbacks of Big Pharma's fixation with copycat drugs include the neglect of hundreds of untreatable fatal and disabling illnesses and hundreds of cases of premature death and/or permanent disability related to inadequate safety profiling. Nearly all the major drug recalls in the last few years have involved copycat drugs that were assumed safe because they were chemically similar to medications already on the market.

An Issue First Raised by Ralph Nader

I first learned about me-too drugs when Ralph Nader raised the issue in his 2000 presidential campaign. Dr Marcia Angell, Harvard Senior Lecturer in Social Medicine covers the subject extensively in The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What To Do About It (2004) and in "Excess in the pharmaceutical industry" in the Canadian Medical Association Journal http://www.cmaj.ca/cgi/content/full/171/12/1451

According to Angell, it's quite common for a drug company to manufacture their own copycat drugs when their patent is about to expire on an older drug (which means most doctors and patients will opt for the cheaper generics that become available). She gives the example of AstraZeneca reformulating the ulcer drug Priloxec to bring out Nexium, a nearly identical replacement and then increasing the price of the Prilosec to get people to switch.

More at the link --

[Warpy]

1. He's got the Astra Zeneca story wrong, it was worse than that.

Prilosec was a blockbuster drug. Prevacid, Aciphex and Protonix were the "me too" drugs, with minor chemical differences that allowed them to be patented shortly after Prilosec was.

Astra Zeneca made a fortune on Prilosec. They made so much of a fortune, they tied up the generic drug for five years through bogus suits about formula, packaging, and everything else they could come up with, driving up the cost of the generic so that when it finally was approved, it was only about five bucks a month cheaper than Prilosec. At the same time, they were agitating behind the scenes to get Prilosec approved OTC. When it was, the company producing the generic nearly went bust over it.

Astra Zeneca is about the most predatory drug company out there. I'm paying a couple of bucks more for Prevacid just to avoid giving them any of my money.

Eventually, they came out with Nexium, virtually identical to Prilosec but with just enough of a minor tweak to qualify for a new patent.

[Donnachaidh]

2. Astra Zeneca demands copies of tax returns to aid people who cannot afford their drugs

Back when my DH wasn't working, I went to our local county health dept to get help with med costs. Now we'd presented copies of weekly pay stubs to all other charities that were aiding us with other costs -- but AZ insisted that they had to have a full tax return in order to *consider* helping us.

WTF? This should not be happening in this country.