For years, hospital executives have expressed frustration when essential drugs like heart medicines have become scarce, or when prices have skyrocketed because investors manipulated the market.
Now, some of the country’s largest hospital systems are taking an aggressive step to combat the problem: They plan to go into the drug business themselves, in a move that appears to be the first on this scale.
“This is a shot across the bow of the bad guys,” said Dr. Marc Harrison, the chief executive of Intermountain Healthcare, the nonprofit Salt Lake City hospital group that is spearheading the effort. “We are not going to lay down. We are going to go ahead and try and fix it.”
While Intermountain executives would not name the drugs they intend to make, hospitals have long experienced shortages of drugs like morphine or encountered sudden price increases for old, off-patent products like the heart medicine Nitropress. Hospitals have also come under criticism for overcharging for their services, including for some drugs.
Several major hospital systems, including Ascension, a Catholic system that is the nation’s largest nonprofit hospital group, plan to form a new nonprofit company, that will provide a number of generic drugs to the hospitals. The Department of Veterans Affairs is also expressing interest in participating.
In all, about 300 hospitals are now included in the group. Other hospitals are expected to join.
Dr. Harrison said they planned to focus only on certain drugs. “There are individual places where there are problems,” he said. “We are not indicting an entire industry.”
Dr. Kevin A. Schulman, a professor of medicine at the Duke University School of Medicine who has studied the generic drug market and is advising the effort, said: “If they all agree to buy enough to sustain this effort, you will have a huge threat to people that are trying to manipulate the generic drug market. They will want to think twice.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/18/health/drug-prices-hospitals.html
If things go as they normally do, the drug lobby will try to get states to ban such cooperative ventures. Not long after cities realized that they could provide better internet services at lower prices than the oligopolies, the big internet provides started lobbying states to ban such services.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy...-won-limits-on-public-broadband-in-20-states/
We'll see how this one plays out.
Now, some of the country’s largest hospital systems are taking an aggressive step to combat the problem: They plan to go into the drug business themselves, in a move that appears to be the first on this scale.
“This is a shot across the bow of the bad guys,” said Dr. Marc Harrison, the chief executive of Intermountain Healthcare, the nonprofit Salt Lake City hospital group that is spearheading the effort. “We are not going to lay down. We are going to go ahead and try and fix it.”
While Intermountain executives would not name the drugs they intend to make, hospitals have long experienced shortages of drugs like morphine or encountered sudden price increases for old, off-patent products like the heart medicine Nitropress. Hospitals have also come under criticism for overcharging for their services, including for some drugs.
Several major hospital systems, including Ascension, a Catholic system that is the nation’s largest nonprofit hospital group, plan to form a new nonprofit company, that will provide a number of generic drugs to the hospitals. The Department of Veterans Affairs is also expressing interest in participating.
In all, about 300 hospitals are now included in the group. Other hospitals are expected to join.
Dr. Harrison said they planned to focus only on certain drugs. “There are individual places where there are problems,” he said. “We are not indicting an entire industry.”
Dr. Kevin A. Schulman, a professor of medicine at the Duke University School of Medicine who has studied the generic drug market and is advising the effort, said: “If they all agree to buy enough to sustain this effort, you will have a huge threat to people that are trying to manipulate the generic drug market. They will want to think twice.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/18/health/drug-prices-hospitals.html
If things go as they normally do, the drug lobby will try to get states to ban such cooperative ventures. Not long after cities realized that they could provide better internet services at lower prices than the oligopolies, the big internet provides started lobbying states to ban such services.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy...-won-limits-on-public-broadband-in-20-states/
We'll see how this one plays out.
