Turing Pharmaceuticals and Valeant ($VRX) may have touched off a
public and congressional firestorm over drug pricing last fall,
but drugmakers haven't given up the tactic. Despite all of the
conversation on the topic, a Wall Street Journal analysis has
found that many of the world’s biggest pharma companies continued to
utilize price increases to boost sales into this year.
Pfizer ($PFE), Biogen ($BIIB), Gilead Sciences ($GILD),
Amgen ($AMGN) and AbbVie ($ABBV) all benefitted from higher prices on
big-selling meds in the first quarter, WSJ said, along with
greater prescription volume in some cases. Amgen raised the U.S. list
price of its Enbrel by 28% in 2015 and another 9.9% this month, while
AbbVie raised Humira’s price 18% last year, WSJ said, citing an analyst report and AbbVie filings.
Price increases were so widespread in the first quarter that WSJ
found more than two-thirds of the 20 largest biopharma companies used
the maneuver to grow sales. That’s in spite of several federal
investigations into drug pricing, a spate of state efforts to rein
in prices and a national conversation on drug prices that has weighed on
pharma and biotech stocks since last year. But talk hasn’t turned into
action, as Congress has so far not demonstrated an interest in taking up
the issue, WSJ points out.
It’s the latest in a long line of reports on price
increases since Turing Pharmaceuticals’ now-notorious 5,000% Daraprim
price hike last September. Last month, Mylan ($MYL) was named in an
analyst report for raising the prices of 24 drugs by more than 20%;
Wells Fargo's David Maris called the changes “beacons for scrutiny”
given the climate. To ring in the new year, Pfizer raised the prices on
dozens of meds, by 10.6% on average.
But the trend may be slowing, as Deutsche Bank analysts
said in May that drug price increases had been slower than in 2015. The
group said average price jumps were 5% through April 2016 versus 7.8%
for the same period in 2015.
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