Unsubstantiated price hikes drove U.S. drug spending up $805 million in 2021-report

[Eugene]

Source: Reuters

Unsubstantiated price hikes drove U.S. drug spending up $805 million in 2021-report

Bhanvi Satija
Tue, December 6, 2022 at 9:09 AM·2 min read

(Reuters) -Price increases spread among seven of the 10 drugs in 2021 behind an $805 million increase in U.S. spending from the prior year were not supported by clinical evidence, an influential U.S. pricing research firm said on Tuesday.

The Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER) said the spending increase in 2021 was still less than the $1.67 billion rise in the previous year. This is the third year the group has looked at the top 250 drugs by spending and assessed if those driving U.S. spending increases were justified.

"Last year, a huge part of the (increase in) spending was all one drug...in this year, we saw the increase was more spread out across different drugs," ICER's Chief Medical Officer David Rind told Reuters.

In 2020, Abbvie's rheumatoid arthritis therapy Humira led to an almost $1.4 billion increase in U.S. drug spending, accounting for over 80% of the total increase.

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Read more: https://news.yahoo.com/price-hikes-medicare-therapies-unsupported-130903848.html

[Warpy]

1. Autoimmune diseases are a gold mine for vulture capitalists

because they're incurable. While the biologic drugs (monoclonal antibodies) can initiate remission in patients young and healthy enough to take them, the damned diseases always resurface later on.

I'm delighted that no one else will ever have tinnitus from high dose aspirin therapy or burnt out kidneys from NSAIDs or sudden death from COX-2 inhibitors. The Feds do need to step in on the pricing structures, "your money or your life" is the choice a lot of people face every day in this country, and that should not be the case.

This country has never dealt fairly with the health care system and its pernicious effect on working people. It should have been nationalized decades ago instead of being turned into a cash cow by Richard Fucking Nixon.