Author: Peter

The U.S. Treasury Department...placed sanctions on Goldpharma, an Argentina-based network of online pharmacies that it said contributed to the opioid crisis by selling clandestinely produced narcotics to customers in the United States...The Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control also designated eight Argentine nationals and nine entities located in Argentina, Colombia, Canada, Britain and the Netherlands for their roles in Goldpharma...“The Goldpharma network illustrates the sophisticated tactics drug traffickers and money launderers use to capitalize on the Internet and online pharmacy sites to sell highly addictive illicit narcotics around the world,” said Sigal Mandelker, Treasury under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence...READ MORE

The National Community Pharmacists Association and the National Association of Chain Drug Stores issued a joint statement expressing their frustration at the release of HHS’s final drug pricing rule for Medicare and Medicaid. The final version of the rule fails to reform pharmacy direct and indirect remuneration fees...READ MORE

The Australian subsidiaries of British drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline and Swiss drugmaker Novartis misled customers and broke the law by promoting identical liniments as though they could treat specific ills, an Australian court found...The court said the companies admitted marketing Voltaren Osteo Gel as a treatment for osteoarthritis-related pain when its ingredients were the same as a cheaper Voltaren product, Emulgel...Judge Bromwich is yet to set a fine but the maximum penalty is the higher of A$10 million ($7 million), triple the benefit earned from the misleading conduct or - if that cannot be determined - a tenth of the annual turnover of the company in question...READ MORE

Twenty of the biggest generic prescription drug makers are accused of committing a multi-billion dollar fraud on U.S. consumers. The states, including Nevada, and Puerto Rico filed a complaint...alleging the companies coordinated to inflate prices and reduce competition on more than 100 generic prescription drugs...The drug companies deny engaging in any illegal collusion saying prices go up with drug shortages and market forces....the Association for Accessible Medicines...says it and its member companies are "committed to supporting policies that promote competition."...“Generic drugs are intended to create competition in the marketplace and make treatment more affordable and accessible for patients with acute and chronic conditions,” said Attorney General Aaron Ford. “In the United States, 9 out of 10 filled prescriptions are for generic drugs patients rely on for care, making these alleged anti-competitive practices even more troublesome. Many Nevadans, especially our seniors, struggle with the skyrocketing cost of prescriptions, and my office will aggressively pursue drug companies who take advantage of patients’ need for health care. This unified and targeted action illustrates my Bureau of Consumer Protection’s continued dedication to holding these companies and individuals accountable for the consequences their actions have had on the American people and our health care system.”...READ MORE

Governments are working on a drug pricing transparency deal at the World Health Organization’s annual assembly, but activists said...they fear crucial costs may be left out, enabling pharmaceutical firms to keep prices high...Campaigners say some drugs are exorbitantly priced, even though they are often developed with public funding, and health providers often pay far too much, since governments negotiate prices without knowing what the treatment cost to develop...A six-page draft published by the WHO on Thursday urges states to publish prices and costs of medicines, vaccines, cell and gene-based therapies and other health technologies, and improve the transparency of medical patents...Transparency campaigners said they feared that a handful of countries, including Germany and Britain, were trying to kill the resolution with “a thousand cuts”...READ MORE

Novartis is looking to launch spinal muscular atrophy gene therapy Zolgensma this year. But the possibility of a price tag as high as $5 million has already sparked controversy. To prepare for the pricey rollout, CEO Vas Narasimhan is now calling for changes to the U.S. drug payment system...For chronic diseases, current healthcare systems are made in a “pay-as-you-go model,” but not for single-treatment therapies that could potentially cure them. And that makes new models for evaluating the benefits of such treatments and for payment necessary...“[W]e need new economic models to determine exactly how much value [a cure] represents” when compared with the cost and suffering saved from longtime chronic care...READ MORE

Samantha DiGrande, Welcome to This Week in Managed Care from the Managed Markets News Network

Clark County Commission Chairwoman Marilyn Kirkpatrick pushed for more progress on the long-awaited UNLV School of Medicine building during a board meeting...The vexed commission chair expressed concern about project delays, saying her constituents haven’t gotten what was promised, including space for the UNLV Ackerman Autism Center. She asked for monthly updates to the commission’s management team...“I need more than a commitment. I need a hard date, a hard timeline, a hard communication expectation, because what I will tell you is that for me, I am super-frustrated with this whole thing,” Kirkpatrick said. “I have been waiting for financing for 10 years. That’s where we’re at.”...READ MORE

A new study from Sweden is suggesting that many older adults with cancer are being prescribed preventive medications at the end of their lives that may harm their quality of life while providing questionable clinical benefits. The problem may stem from inadequate deprescribing...The study...online in Cancer, found that deprescribing strategies need to be more widely adopted to help reduce the burden of drugs that have limited clinical benefit near the end of life...The goal of palliative care is to reduce symptoms and maximize the quality of life, but sometimes what is used as palliative treatment decreases quality of life and that’s troubling...READ MORE