For those of us who criticized the Affordable Care Act for not going far enough, a big part of the concern was the law’s reliance on the private insurance industry to handle much of the expanded coverage. That industry, with its history of denying coverage and inflated premiums, deserved to be phased out rather than being awarded a large new captive customer base.
It now looks like an even more serious problem for healthcare reform will be another industry with a checkered past: Big Pharma. The drugmakers are generating a growing crisis not only for Obamacare but also for more established programs such as Medicare and Medicaid.
When the federal government recently released data on Medicare billings by individual providers, many of the top amounts were linked to doctors who administer expensive drugs in their offices and thus include the cost of those treatments in their Medicare claims. For example, some 3,000 ophthalmologists billed an average of $1 million each (one billed $21 million by himself), reflecting heavy use of an expensive medication for macular degeneration injected into the eye.
Another challenge comes from Sovaldi, a new hepatitis C drug sold by Gilead Sciences with a list price of $1,000 per pill, or $84,000 for a typical course of treatment. The product is doing great things for Gilead, which recorded $2.3 billion in sales for the drug’s first full quarter on the market — a pharmaceutical industry record.
It is causing problems for those entities that have to pay for use of the drug, including state Medicaid programs, the Department of Veterans Affairs and private insurance companies. One of the largest of those companies, UnitedHealth Group, recently cited the cost of hepatitis C treatments such as Sovaldi as one of the reasons for a drop in its earnings in the first quarter of 2014.
Earlier, several members of Congress, including Rep. Henry Waxman of California, sent a letter to Gilead expressing concern about the price of Sovaldi, but it generated little concern on the part of the company or the rest of the industry. One pharma industry analyst was quoted as saying: “We just look at this letter as a little bit of noise.”
Unfortunately, the dismissive tone was justified. Congress has done little to rein in the cost of prescription drugs and even took the absurd step of barring the federal government from negotiating with pharmaceutical providers in the Medicare Part D program.
The cost problem will only get worse. Patents are expiring on many major drugs, and the industry is creating fewer new ones, prompting companies to squeeze everything they can out of their shrinking product lines.
That means higher prices and other shady practices such as promoting drugs for uses for which they have not been approved. Many of the industry’s largest companies have paid large amounts to settle illegal-marketing charges brought against them by the Justice Department, among them Eli Lilly ($1.4 billion relating to Zyprexa), GlaxoSmithKline ($3 billion relating to Paxil and Wellbutrin) and Pfizer ($2.3 billion relating to Bextra and other medications).
Illegal marketing is just one of the serious charges brought against Big Pharma in recent years. The $3 billion GlaxoSmithKline settlement also covered allegations that it withheld crucial safety data on its diabetes drug Avandia from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Merck paid the federal government more than $650 million to settle charges that it routinely overbilled Medicaid and other government programs and made illegal payments to healthcare professionals to induce them to prescribe its products. Eli Lilly paid $29 million to settle foreign bribery charges.
It remains to be seen whether these cases have prompted Big Pharma to clean up its act. I remain skeptical, especially in light of recent signs that the industry is engaged in more concentration designed to allow companies to narrow their focus and thus gain bigger market share in particular sectors.
More specialization will mean less competition, which in turn will mean fewer choices and rising prices. When it comes to drugs, the Affordable Care Act will have increasing difficulty living up to its name.