Month: December 2015

The big story, the one that made news directors perk up their ears, made congressmen call hearings, and made jaws drop across the country was the story about a 62 year-old drug – a senior citizen of a drug – called Daraprim that overnight went from $13.50 a tablet to $750 a tablet. A 5000% increase for no other reason than a company called Turing Pharmaceuticals bought the drug and raised the price because it could. The drug is used to treat malaria, HIV, and other infections.

The office of U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett was among the stops a San Marcos delegation made on a recent trip to Washington, D.C. To lobby for federal relief in the wake of this year’s two devastating floods.

WASHINGTON — Citing Texans’ complaints of soaring prescription costs, U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett is leading an effort in Congress seeking causes and remedies. Doggett, D-Austin, has formed an entity called the Prescription Drug Pricing Task Force, and one of the initial efforts is pressuring the Obama administration to use its authority to stem an ongoing rise in the costs of pharmaceuticals. […] Doggett and allies point to price boosts for many drugs, evidenced in a government study last week showing a 12.2 percent increase last year in prescription drug spending. Leigh Purvis, director of Health Services Research at AARP’s Public Policy Institute, has been studying drug pricing since 2004. In a bipartisan investigation, the Senate Finance Committee released emails last week showing that executives of California-based Gilead Sciences were keenly aware of potential public outrage when they set the $84,000 cost for a 12-week treatment of Sovaldi, a potent new drug for hepatitis C. […] the Senate’s bipartisan Special Committee on Aging is investigating the decision by Turing Pharmaceuticals, formed recently by hedge fund manager Martin Shkreli, to raise the price of the anti-infection drug Daraprim by 5,000 percent — from $13.50 a pill to $750. Doggett said he also will be looking at Affordable Care Act programs for potential relief while pressing the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, part of Health and Human Services, for more transparency related to negotiated drug prices. For injections of Faslodex, used to combat metastatic breast cancer, she was billed between $5,000 and $6,000 a month.