Tandem Price Increases: Legal or Price Fixing?

An article by reporters at Bloomberg recently highlighted the way United States prosecutors are beginning to crack down on generic drug companies, conducting a “sweeping criminal investigation into suspected price collusion,” which adds a new challenge to an industry that has been the focus of public outrage for quite some time now. The antitrust investigation, which began roughly two years ago at the Department of Justice, now spans more than a dozen companies and two dozen drugs. The grand jury probe is examining whether some executives worked together to raise prices, and the first charges could potentially be made by the end of the year. Piggybacking off of recent moves by the federal government, individuals who are responsible stand the possibility of being charged. The Washington Post delved a bit deeper into the issue, going back to 1998 when Amgen launched Enbrel, its “transformative arthritis treatment.” In 2002, federal regulators approved a similar drug, Humira. The drugs work very much the same way and are approved for many of the same ailments. While they have been immensely valuable to patients, they have also been large profit drivers for the two pharmaceutical companies that make them, naturally making the companies targets. A review of price increases for both drugs shows that they have undergone “closely timed list price increases, nearly identical in magnitude, for more than a decade.” While there is nothing illegal about competing drug price...
Source: Policy and Medicine - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs