How Big Pharma rips off everybody by selling low-cost pills at over 1000% mark-ups
by: Isabelle Z.
NaturalNews.com
Sunday, September 03, 2017
There are lots of reasons that people despise Big Pharma, but a recent investigation has revealed yet another way that drug companies are ripping people off: by selling the exact same medications for very different prices using different packaging.
According to U.K. consumer watchdog group Which?, some branded medications are being sold for up to ten times the price of the bargain-priced versions even though the drugs are completely identical.
In other cases, companies put the same drug in different boxes and marketed them for different uses, sometimes charging different prices yet again for what is exactly the same medications. For example, the nasal spray Otrivine is sold in three different boxes labeled for sinusitis, allergies, and congestion, but all three sprays are medically identical. It might not be illegal, but it’s quite misleading.
Another tactic they uncovered was charging a high premium for mixing together two cheap treatments into a combination pill. For example, a mixture of ibuprofen and acetaminophen known as Nuromol in the U.K. is sold for ten times the price of taking the two separate pills in the same doses. In the U.S., the combination drug Treximet for migraines is sold at an average cash price of $875 for nine pills, but the two drugs it contains, sumatriptan and naproxen, can be bought for $16 for nine tablets and $12 for 300 tablets, respectively, at Walmart.
In another form of trickery, Consumer Reports says that the allergy drug Clarinex sells for $235 for the name brand and $45 for the generic version. However, its active ingredient, desloratadine, becomes loratadine once it has been metabolized by the body. This is the same drug as Claritin OTC, and you can buy a generic brand of loratadine for just $4 at Walmart.
Drug makers will sometimes introduce extended-release versions of existing drugs or simply change the way they are administered or their dosage to make it seem new and charge more for it, while also keeping cheaper generics off of the market. This is the case with the schizophrenia medicine Adasuve. The drug is simply a reformulation of the oral drug loxapine into an inhaler. It sells for an estimated monthly price of $4,550, while the capsule version of loxapine costs just $45.
Arbitrary price hikes
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