Sales Soared Under Insulin Makers’ Marketing Tactics, But Patients Paid Price

Reuters: How Drugmakers Pushed Diabetes Patients Into A Danger Zone
Pharmaceutical giants launched years-long marketing campaigns for a treatment target they helped create, and as their sales of diabetes drugs soared, so did incidents of low blood sugar, a potentially deadly medication risk. (Respaut, Terhune and Nelson, 11/4)

Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting: Life-Saving Insulin ‘Belongs To The World,’ Scientists Said. Pricing Challenges That Concept.
In 1921, scientists in Canada discovered insulin. After winning the Nobel Prize, they sold the patent for $1 each, saying the hormone for battling diabetes “belongs to the world.” Now, a century later, many Americans are crossing the border to buy the life-saving medicine for themselves and their families, or ordering it online, because insulin can be up to 10 times cheaper there. That’s no surprise given that the list price for a vial of insulin has skyrocketed in the U.S. from 75 cents to $250 in a little more than a half-century. (Mitchell, 11/9)

Stat: How Nancy Pelosi Almost Killed Drug Pricing Reform — A Gamble That Expanded Democrats' Final Deal
The White House stunned health care experts last month when it declared it was abandoning its efforts to reform drug pricing in the major domestic spending package moving through Congress, a seeming death knell for what had long been a major priority for Democrats. But unlike earlier in the negotiations, moderate Democrats weren’t the holdouts. This time, it was Speaker Nancy Pelosi who dealt the blow, late the night before, to the latest deal on offer, according to a person familiar with the negotiations. It was her behind-the-scenes opposition, which has not been previously reported, that prompted the White House to declare the issue dead — a surprising role for Pelosi, given her decades of long support for sweeping efforts to lower drug prices. (Cohrs, 11/9)

FiercePharma: Judge Overturns $2.4M Whistleblower Retaliation Verdict Against AstraZeneca
After AstraZeneca and a former manager-turned-whistleblower each scored partial wins in a retaliation and age discrimination lawsuit, AstraZeneca has nabbed a victory in appeals. In the case of Suzanne Ivie, who sued AstraZeneca alleging the company fired her after she raised concerns about off-label marketing, an appeals court has vacated a jury's $2.4 million verdict against the drugmaker. (Sagonowsky, 11/9)

Reuters: U.S. To Pay $1 Billion For 1.4 Mln More Courses Of Merck's COVID-19 Pill
Merck & Co Inc and partner Ridgeback Biotherapeutics said on Tuesday the U.S. government would pay about $1 billion to buy an additional 1.4 million courses of their COVID-19 pill. Merck's Molnupiravir has been closely watched since data last month showed that when given early in the illness it could halve the chances of dying or being hospitalized for those most at risk of developing severe COVID-19. (11/8)

Stat: Hospitals Charge Insurers More Than What Medicare Pays For Infused Drugs
Nearly a dozen of the highest-rated hospitals in the U.S. charged commercial health insurers and cash-paying patients significantly more than what Medicare has recently paid for 10 infused medicines on which the government spends the most money, according to a new analysis. Median prices exceeded the Medicare Part B payment limit by a low of 169% at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, while the Mayo Clinic Hospital in Phoenix exceeded the payment limit by 344%. Among cash-paying customers, the prices ranged from 149% of the Medicare payment limit at Rush to 306% at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital, both based in Boston. (Silverman, 11/8)

Becker's Hospital Review: Private Insurers, Cash-Paying Patients Pay Much More Than Medicare For Hospital Drugs
Private insurers and cash-paying patients face prices several times higher than the Medicare rate for clinician-administered drugs, according to a study published Nov. 8 in JAMA Internal Medicine. Researchers searched the websites of the 20 top-rated hospitals by U.S. News & World Report for drug pricing files between Jan. 1 and Sept. 15, extracting private insurer-negotiated prices and self-pay cash prices for the 10 drugs with the highest 2019 Medicare Part B expenditures. (Adams, 11/9)

Ohio Capital Journal: Are Companies Still Inflating The Cost Of Medicaid Drugs? 
Last week, Ohio Medicaid Director Maureen Corcoran revealed something with potentially far-reaching implications: When her department calculates how much to pay managed-care companies she’s not sure if it it knows the true cost of the prescription drugs for which it is shelling out billions. If the drug middlemen hired by Ohio’s Medicaid managed-care contractors are reporting inflated drug costs, that would appear to violate both state and federal law. It also could violate a federal rule that is a fundamental brake on for-profit corporations that have access to many billions of taxpayer dollars meant to help the poor. The issue might be getting attention from members of the U.S. Senate. (Schladen, 11/4)

Stat: New Court Rulings Add To The Dispute Over A U.S. Drug Discount Program
In the latest twist in a closely watched legal battle, two different federal court judges late last week reached largely conflicting views about the approach taken by the U.S. government to enforce a controversial prescription drug discount program. One judge decided the federal government overstepped its bounds when it threatened earlier this year to penalize Novartis and United Therapeutics for curtailing discounts in what is known as the 340B drug discount program. However, the judge in the other case, which was brought by Sanofi and Novo Nordisk, took the opposite view, yet at the same time also told the government to reassess a key issue concerning the use of contract pharmacies, which are at the heart of the dispute. (Silverman, 11/6)

Ohio Capital Journal: CVS Sometimes Forces People To Use Its Pharmacies. Now The Supreme Court Will Weigh In
It’s a practice long complained of in Ohio. CVS Health and other massive corporations often use their pharmacy middleman subsidiaries to force people to get the most expensive class of drugs from the businesses’ own mail-order pharmacies. Some call the practice “patient steering. ”CVS and companies such as UnitedHealth and ExpressScripts/Cigna say the arrangements save patients money. But some patients, oncologists and other health providers say it threatens lives. Now the U.S. Supreme Court is poised to weigh in. In a little more than a month, it will hear arguments in a California case in which AIDS patients are claiming the practice discriminates against them. (Schladen, 11/5)

NPR: New Alzheimer's Drug Aduhelm Flops With Doctors And Patients
The new Alzheimer's drug Aduhelm isn't reaching many patients. And doctors say reasons include its high cost, insurers' reluctance to cover it, and lingering questions about whether it actually slows memory loss. "The pendulum of public opinion has swayed strongly against this drug," says Dr. Marwan Sabbagh, an Alzheimer's specialist at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Ariz., who has worked as an advisor to Biogen, which makes the drug. (Hamilton, 11/8)

Bloomberg: A Video Game Only A Pharmacist Could Love Ferrets Out Drug Fraud
Robert Lodder, a professor at the University of Kentucky’s School of Pharmacy and a biopharmaceutical entrepreneur, has long enjoyed a good video game. Now he’s turning his passion for gaming into a powerful tool to identify defective and dangerous drugs. Together with Heather Campbell, an engineer in the pharmaceutical industry who has a penchant for software coding, Lodder has created a video game to help hospitals and pharmacies ferret out shoddy drugs. The pair have already deployed their game to lead them to a disturbing insight: Some pharmaceutical firms may be skimping on active ingredients to save money at the expense of drug quality. For someone with a headache, that could mean a bit of added discomfort. For a patient recovering from heart surgery, a weakened drug could cause serious harm.  (Edney, 11/7)