Author: Peter

Drug companies are making record profits and at the same time raising the prices of life-saving prescription drugs...Additionally, drug companies have no legal obligation to justify or explain the massive spikes in drug prices...the FAIR Drug Pricing Act, a bill that takes the first step in addressing skyrocketing prescription drug prices by requiring basic transparency for pharmaceutical companies that drastically spike the price of a drug...whose initials stand for “Fair Accountability and Innovative Research," would require drug companies to give notice and justification for raising the price of a drug more than 10 percent at one time or more than 25 percent over three years...For each price increase drug companies would have to tell the public what they spent on manufacturing, research and development costs for the qualifying drug, net profits attributable to the qualifying drug, and marketing and advertising spending on the qualifying drug...

The Nevada Supreme Court has agreed to quickly take up the question of whether a drug company can block the use of its product in an inmate's execution...Prison officials won expedited review Friday, just minutes after filing documents saying the state faces the expiration of one of three drugs it wants to use...State Attorney General Adam Laxalt's office says it needs a high court ruling by Oct. 19...That would put twice-convicted killer Scott Raymond Dozier's twice-postponed lethal injection on track for mid-November...Dozier says he wants to die, but judges have for different reasons blocked the never-tried combination of drugs the state drew up after struggling to find lethal injection supplies...Pharmaceutical firm Alvogen says Nevada improperly obtained its sedative midazolam to use in Dozier's execution.

European drugmakers Roche, Bayer and Merck KGaA became the latest companies to freeze prices in the United States for the rest of 2018 following criticism by President Donald Trump over the cost of medicine...Roche did boost U.S. prices for nine key drugs by an average of 3 percent on July 1, but said it would hold off additional increases as discussions with the Trump administration continue over a longer-term solution to containing healthcare costs...The European announcements on Friday follow similar moves from Novartis, Pfizer and U.S. drugmaker Merck.

While most states are still grappling with the Trump administration’s decision earlier this month to slash funding for a program that helps people purchase health insurance on the exchange, Nevada is gearing up for open enrollment later this year by expanding the enrollment assistance it offers to consumers...Nevada’s health insurance exchange announced earlier this month that it would be nearly doubling the number of brokers, navigators and in-person assister organizations available to help walk people through the process of signing up for health insurance this year, calling the assistance program a “critical component” in an oftentimes “intimidating and complicated process.” That announcement stood in stark contrast to a decision by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services a little more than a week later to scale back the navigator program for the fully federally facilitated marketplaces in 34 other states, saying that “the need for federally funded Navigators has diminished.”

A Chinese vaccine scandal has laid bare a new challenge Beijing faces in its long-running battle for information control: blogs and online articles by independent writers capable of unleashing a storm of public fury...The outrage over safety lapses by Changsheng Bio-technology Co Ltd in some of its vaccines for children came six days after the issue was flagged in regulatory filings, triggered instead by a July 21 article posted on the popular WeChat messaging platform...Titled “Vaccine King” and posted to a WeChat account managed by former journalists, it critiqued business practices by Changsheng’s chairwoman and was read tens of thousands of times before being deleted the next day...The enormous impact of the so-called “zi meiti”, or “self-media” article marks a threat to efforts by China’s ruling Communist Party to tighten its grip over content online...The article touched a nerve in a country already scarred by a long history of drug and food scandals. A day later Chinese social media was ablaze...For China, keeping a tight grip on the flow of information is seen as key to maintaining social stability in the world’s most populous nation...

Laura Joszt, Managing Editor at The American Journal of Managed Care. Welcome to This Week in Managed Care from the Managed Markets News Network

Drug regulators across Europe are hiring extra staff and increasing their workload as the role of British experts in the EU-wide system of medicines supervision winds down ahead of Brexit...Britain has already stopped taking on new projects that will extend beyond March 29, 2019 and is preparing to hand over existing drug review work to other countries...Despite a vote by UK members of parliament this week calling for Britain’s continued participation in the Europe regulatory network for medicines, there is no certainty that any such deal will be reached...That reflects the wider lack of clarity over Britain’s future relationship with the world’s biggest trading bloc after it leaves the EU next March...The Brexit-induced disruption also comes at a time when regulators are having to grapple with oversight of a range of new health technologies, such as gene therapy, and a slew of big data on health outcomes...Global drug companies, including UK-based GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca, have been vocal in calling for continued close EU-UK ties after Brexit. The issue is also important to many Japanese drugmakers that have made Britain their European base.

Walgreens Boots Alliance is launching a new digital marketplace that will connect the pharmacy chain's mobile visitors to its drugstores as well as local doctors and clinics...The move comes as Walgreens, CVS Health, Walmart and other brick-and-mortar retailers with health services face the possibility online retailer Amazon will expand deeper into the healthcare business...But Walgreens is stressing ties to local healthcare providers, which Amazon doesn’t yet have...Walgreens “Find Care Now” platform lists cash prices for healthcare services for everything from a local clinic or optometrist to the cost of a telehealth vendor’s virtual doctor consultation. For now, there are 16 local health systems and national healthcare providers participating in Find Care Now but Walgreens said they expect more to join the marketplace.

Nicole Grassano, PTNN, Pharmacy Week in Review, this weekly video program provides our readers with an in-depth review of the latest news, product approvals, FDA rulings and more.

...the Governor’s Opioid State Action Accountability Task Force met in the Capitol building in Carson City, with the conference being teleconferenced to Las Vegas...The meeting provided status reports on the four tracks - prescriber education and guidelines, treatment options and third-party payers, data collection and intelligence sharing, and criminal justice investigations that were developed during the two-day Governor’s Prescription Drug Abuse Summit in 2016...meeting was the third time the opioid state action accountability task force came together, and opioid use has been steadily going down in Nevada since it peaked in 2011