A quick follow up to my earlier post regarding the skulduggery that goes on between Big Pharma and little pharma and their conspiracies to keep generic meds from the market. Today we hear by way of the trade magazine Pharmacy Times of yet another ingenious way that Big Pharma has to ensure the maximum amount of money is transferred from you to them. First a little background. The FDA has a "first across the line" incentive for generic med applications, meaning that the first company to get it's application approved gets 180 days exclusive marketing rights, essentially a temporary monopoly on the sale of any alternative to the brand name med. Anyone out there see the loophole yet? It works like this. Big Pharma sets up a subsidiary to apply for a generic approval for the parent companies med, and since daddy company is already making the stuff, it would seem that baby company might have a bit of an inside track to get it's application approved first. When it does, it happily sells it's product for a little bit less than brand name daddy, for 6 months, when it invariably loses interest in the product as the real generic companies start to manufacture and sell the med at the price the free market determines.
Ingenious. I'll give them that. I just wish they would turn the brainpower involved into researching out how to exploit the rules into maybe researching something like hmmmmm...cancer?
1 comment:
explains why freaking generic zpak is still pricey....$50 bucks where I work....can't wait till it goes closer to the route of Amox.
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