Tag: Pharmaceutical Companies

New Drug Prices Spiked in 2023 as Biden Admin Seeks to Keep Costs Down

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Joe Biden Drug Costs

Pharmaceutical companies set median starting list prices 35% higher in 2023 than the previous year, despite the Biden administration’s ongoing efforts to tamp down on surging costs, Reuters reported Friday.

The median list price for a drug being placed on the market, many of which were for rare diseases, was $300,000 in 2023, which is up from a median price of $222,000 in 2022, according to an analysis by Reuters of 47 drugs. The Biden administration has made it a goal to tame drug prices, announcing steps like imposing automatic rebates to Medicare for drugmakers that raise their prices faster than the rate of inflation, which does not cover the starting list price.

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Experts: Revamped OxyContin Hasn’t Curbed Abuse, Overdoses

The Associated Press

A panel of government health advisers said Friday there’s no clear evidence that a harder-to-crush version of the painkiller OxyContin designed to discourage abuse actually resulted in fewer overdoses or deaths.

The conclusion from the Food and Drug Administration advisory panel comes more than a decade after Purdue Pharma revamped its blockbuster opioid, which has long been blamed for sparking a surge in painkiller abuse beginning in the 1990s.

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Pharmaceutical Companies Sign Joint Pledge Promising a Safe Coronavirus Vaccine as Public Confidence Dips

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Nine pharmaceutical companies signed a joint pledge Tuesday promising to prioritize safety and science regarding the development and distribution of a coronavirus vaccine.

The pledge is meant to counter declining public confidence in an eventual vaccine, Politico reported. An August CNN poll found that just over half of Americans would be willing to take a vaccine once developed, and a recent Politico poll found that over 60% of voters opposed the release of any vaccine that had not undergone full testing.

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Seven Pharma Execs Who Testified Before Congress Tuesday Make a Combined $116 Million Per Year

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by Evie Fordham   Five of the seven pharmaceutical companies who sent executives to testify on drug pricing before the Senate Finance Committee Tuesday have the top-25 highest-paid pharma CEOs for companies in the S&P 500. CEOs from AbbVie, AstraZeneca, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Merck, Pfizer and Sanofi plus Johnson & Johnson’s executive vice president of pharmaceuticals, Jennifer Taubert, were grilled by Senate Finance Chair Chuck Grassley and other lawmakers at the hearing. Altogether, the top-25 CEOs whose companies were represented Tuesday received a combined $116,671,792 in compensation, including stock and stock options, in 2017, according to analysis by The Wall Street Journal. That number includes annual compensation for former Pfizer CEO Ian Read, who ceded the position to new CEO Albert Bourla in January. Bourla testified before the committee Tuesday. Johnson & Johnson CEO Alex Gorsky rakes in the most out of the CEOs, with yearly compensation valued at $29,802,564, according to The WSJ. Taubert, who repped Johnson & Johnson and its pharmaceutical arm Janssen at Tuesday’s hearing, has no annual compensation data available according to Bloomberg. The runner-up is former Pfizer CEO Ian Read, who had yearly compensation of more than $27 million. He had agreed to delay implementing proposed…

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