So, Bernie Sanders is off on one about the immorality of capitalism, drug patents, vile dastards ripping off the American consumer and all that:
The blockbuster weight-loss drugs Wegovy and Ozempic are arguably as omnipresent in the American zeitgeist as Taylor Swift or the iPhone. The drugs and others in its class are associated with the sparkle of Hollywood, on the lips of Oprah and considered transformative by doctors.
But the giant market for drugs like Wegovy, including not just the roughly 11% of adults who have diabetes but also the 42% of adults who have obesity, has conjured one of the demons of American healthcare – price.
Americans paid 10 times more for Ozempic than patients in the United Kingdom in 2023 – $936 a month compared with $93. Wegovy costs Americans $1,349 a month, compared with $296 in the Netherlands (the drug is not yet available in the UK).
That wild discrepancy has captured the attention of one of the drug industry’s loudest critics, the US senator Bernie Sanders.
So, yes, it’s all terribly evil:
“Prices vary all over the world, but we are paying far, far, far more for the same products than other countries,” Sanders told the Guardian in an interview. “And that is unacceptable to me.”
Sanders, an independent from Vermont and chairman of the powerful Senate health, education, labor and pensions (Help) committee, has used his pulpit to haul pharmaceutical executives before the public and demand lower prices.
We have talked around here of pharma prices before. We face a specific problem, drugs are expensive to develop. Largely - not exclusively, but largely - because of the costs imposed by American politicians on the proof necessary before a drug is authorised for sale. There’s one way to reduce this which is for the FDA to accept “safe” (safe here meaning no worse than allowing the disease to progress. It’s OK to cause withered dicks in people about to die of penis cancer etc) as being good enough rather than the other standard they also insist upon which is better than anything else currently in use as well. But politicians won’t allow that. Hello Bernie!
It’s also true that price fixing doesn’t work.
It’s even true that it’s just and righteous that Americans should pay more for their drugs. Those development costs - $2 billion or so for each new one - of drugs mean that they’re very close to being public goods. A fortune to develop, pennies to produce, so no one would do that unless they were protected - patents. OK, and it’s a standard part of welfare economics that it should be the richer among us paying to produce those public goods for everyone. Who are the rich in the global system? The 360 million Americans. So, Americans get to pay higher drug costs to cover their development costs to the benefit of everyone else. Nicely redistributive as Senator Sanders would wish. Tho’ he seems strangely resistant to redistribution away from him and his rather than to.
So far all so well known. But then we get this news:
Medicines that enable dramatic weight loss are likely to experience a new boom in uptake, experts have said, as the first generic versions hit the market this week at a lower cost than the original drugs.
The injections, dubbed “skinny jabs” by the media, can help people lose more than 10% of their body weight and have become hugely popular in recent years, with celebrities lauding their effects.
They include Wegovy and Saxenda, which are licensed for weight loss, and Ozempic and Victoza which are licensed for type 2 diabetes but are often prescribed “off-label” as a weight-loss aid.
Squeal like a piggie!
Patents for Victoza and Saxenda have expired, according to Novo Nordisk. As a result, other drugmakers are working on generic versions. Israel’s Teva Pharmaceutical Industries the world’s largest generic drugmaker, launched a generic version of Victoza in the US on Monday.
The move comes days after the US regulator, the Food and Drug Administration, tentatively approved London-based Hikma Pharmaceuticals’ generic version of Victoza.
They’re gonna be cheap, cheap, cheap!
The first article is 24 June 2024. That’s the one where Bernis is complaining. The second article is 25 June 2024. That’s the one announcing the cure for the complaint.
Which is just fantabulousness, isn’t it?
Bernie’s going to hold hearings about a problem that’s solved before he can convene his hearings.
Now do you understand why only a fuckwit looks to populist politics to solve a problem?