TAKE ACTION FOR LOWER DRUG COSTS! HELP SPREAD THE WORD

Consumer Catalyst has launched a social media campaign to raise awareness about how sketchy ‘Pay-for-Delay’ deals hurt consumer health! Join the discussion on twitter and share your story, using the hashtag:

Stop the #RxRacket!

Pharmaceutical companies are colluding to keep drug prices high – and taking that money right out of your pocket.

Did you know drug companies have made more than 160 secret, back-room deals that

• Have kept 100 generic drugs or more off the market for years
• Drive up the cost of each drug by an average of $3,000 a year
• Keep all of our prescription costs high, while divvying up the spoils!

Right now, the Supreme Court is currently deliberating over whether these back-room deals are legal – but we know they’re wrong. Since 2005, as many as 142 different generic drugs have been unfairly kept from consumers, according to government reports. Delaying the launch of a generic drug lets the drug companies make bigger and bigger profits, while patients are stuck footing the bill, or going without the medicines they need.

The Supreme Court heard arguments by the drug companies, and fortunately Justices Kagan and Sotomayor raised consumer concerns – but the Court did not hear the perspective of the thousands of Americans unable to afford their medications. That’s because most people don’t even know that these deals are costing consumers thousands, and our health system billions of extra dollars, each year!

Help us raise awareness of this #RxRacket. The public deserves to know how this decision will affect us all – how thousands of Americans are being forced to choose between skipping their medications or going into credit card debt, just so that drug companies can make even more profit. Not to mention, how health care costs for everyone have gone up, because insurers pay most of these higher costs!

Whatever the Supreme Court decides, help spread the word, so we can help make sure that these deals come to an end, once and for all.

Target drugs: 
If you have taken Cipro, Provigil, or Androgel, you have definitely paid more because of a pay-for-delay settlement. And according to legal experts, it is very probable that many drugs including blockbuster drugs like Lipitor, Plavix and Nexium — have been delayed by pay-for-delay deals.*

We need you to tell everyone you know that this is happening, and help gather and share the stories of people you know that have been negatively impacted.

What you can do:

1. Read the stories shared by two women, Tanna and Karen, who were unable to afford their medications due to pay-for-delay deals that kept generic Provigil off the market for six years. Also, read how the companies’ legal arguments make no sense.
2. Share these posts on Twitter, using the hashtag #RxRacket, and ask others to share their stories too. And follow us at @postscriptrx.
3. Join our community on Facebook to keep up with the campaign and join our email list of impacted consumers by sharing your story.

You can find all the information you would ever need about this issue on our Pay-for-Delay info page. Please also feel free to add your thoughts on this #RxRacket in the comments, below.

Thank you for helping us protect your right to affordable medicine!

*The Full List – Drugs Likely to Have High Prices from ‘Pay-for-Delay’ Deals:
Adderall XR, Aggrenox, Altace, Arthrotec, Caduet, Carbatrol, Clarinex, Comtan, Duac, Effexor XR, Eloxatin, Ethyol, Femcon Fe, Fentora, Flomax, Lipitor, Lamictal, Levaquin, Lexapro, Loestrin-24 Fe, Loprox, Lotrel, Lybrel, Namenda, Naprelan, Nexium, Niaspan, Niravam, Olux, Opana ER, Ortho Tri Cyclen Lo, Oxytrol, Plavix, Propecia, Razadyne, Razadyne ER, Rythmol SR, Sinemet CR, Skelaxin, Solodyn, Stalevo, Tricor 145mg, Vanos, Vfend, Wellbutrin XL (150 mg), Xopenex, and Zantac!

Last Wednesday, FTC and congressional leaders held a press conference highlighting a new FTC report on how drug companies have protected “$20 billion in sales of brand name drugs from generic competition” through collusive, anti-competitive ‘pay-for-delay’ settlements with generic manufacturers.

The FTC report, “Pay-for-Delay: How Drug Company Pay-Offs Cost Consumers Billions” explains how legal decisions starting in 2005 have led to 63 settlements which delay generic drugs for an average of 17 months. FTC  noted that “[m]ost of these agreements are in effect.”  The report estimates, using a very conservative analysis, that these settlements are costing “American consumers $3.5 billion per year — $35 billion over the next ten years.” Other legal experts have previously estimated that these agreements are costing $7.5 billion a year.  

FTC, and congressional advocates urged their colleagues to ban these pay-for-delay agreements, which harm consumers and drive up our health care costs overall.  FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz was joined by Reps. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), Bobby L. Rush (D-Ill.), and Mary Jo Kilroy (D-Ohio) urging legislative action.  At the press conference, Sen. Herb Kohl (D-Wis.) highlighted how the settlements assessed in the report, such as 19 pay-for-delay settlements made in 2009 alone, had “robbed Americans of a competitive marketplace.”  The Report documented how Pharma and the generic manufacturers have increasingly used such ’pay-for-delay’ settlements since they were first upheld by the appellate courts starting in 2005. 

“Each of these backroom deals kept generics off the market, resulting in higher drug costs for millions of consumers and more federal spending in the form of drug reimbursement costs,” Sen. Kohl said.  “Today’s FTC report is proof that if we are serious about bringing down prescription drug costs, we must …  end these anti-consumer, anti-competitive backroom deals.” 

 The current health reform bill passed by the House bans ‘pay-for-delay’ settlements under federal anti-trust law, but the bill passed by the Senate does not. FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz stated, “[w]e also must remember that behind the abstract numbers that show these deals increasing are real people with critical health care needs.  Many Americans struggle to pay for prescription drugs, especially the elderly and uninsured.”

FTC Commissioner J. Thomas Rosch noted that “[d]ecades ago our Supreme Court condemned as illegal per se an agreement by potential competitors stifling competition between them… [and] almost all, if not all, reverse payment agreements do that insofar as they delay generic competition longer than it might otherwise occur.”  While the FTC was successful in preventing the use of pay-for-delay agreements between April 1999 and 2004 and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit held these agreements per se illegal in 2003, the Report observed that beginning in 2005, “a few appellate courts have misapplied the antitrust law to uphold these agreements.” 

The Report also found that while pay-for-delay agreements benefit both the brand-name and generic pharmaceutical companies, they harm consumers.  Earlier last week, Community Catalyst and several other national consumer organizations, wrote to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in support of including a ban on pay-for-delay agreements in national health care reform.

This letter from national consumer groups also proposed to eliminate the ‘bottleneck’ that prevents competition between generic drug companies. Under the Hatch Waxman Act, the first generic company to file an application with FDA to start selling a generic drug is granted a half year (180 days) of exclusive marketing before another generic company can sell the same generic drug.  Unfortunately, current precedent allows this ‘first-filer’ to retain their right to a half-year of market exclusivity even if they sign a settlement deal agreeing to keep their generic off the market.  “Those agreements place a cork in the bottle that typically ensures the brand-name drug’s lock on the market,” the FTC analysis said. “This cork-in-the-bottle effect occurs because every subsequent generic entrant has to wait until the first generic has been marketed for 180 days.”

These settlements are at issue in the PAL member lawsuit promoting access to generic versions of Provigil, and such a pay-for-delay settlement could affect the current PAL-membel lawsuit promoting consumer access to a generic version of Protonix.

Prescription Access Litigation (PAL) coalition member National Women’s Health Network and MergerWatch, which is also part of PAL’s parent organization, Community Catalyst, announce an important national conference coming up on April 17 and 18 in Boston, MA:

RAISING WOMEN’S VOICES FOR THE HEALTH CARE WE NEED!
National Conference – Simmons College, Boston
April 17 & 18

To get the health care debate to reflect women’s issues and concerns, we must join the conversation!

Dynamic conference workshops will prepare you to talk about:

• Why reproductive health must be included in health reform
• Why dependent health insurance is a women’s Issue
• How health care must become culturally competent
• What kinds of childbirth choices women want to see included
• What are the health concerns of older women
• How can we better support women who are providing care at home for elderly relatives

Learn valuable lessons from advocates in states like Massachusetts that have been experimenting with health care reform:

• How you can use personal stories to advocate for health reform
• How you can do effective grassroots organizing
• How to build a health reform law based on existing models
• How to decide on things like whether to require individuals to purchase health insurance
• How you can work with the progressive faith community in your state to advocate for health care for all

For more info, go raisingwomensvoices.net

Raising Women’s Voices for the Health Care We Need is a joint project of
The Avery Institute for Social Change
National Women’s Health Network
MergerWatch Project

Questions? Give us a call! 866-210-3114 or email us at
info@raisingwomensvoices.net

Our friends at The Prescription Project have announced the launch of Postscript, their new blog on pharmaceutically-related medical conflict of interest issues:

PostScript, a blog from the Prescription Project, adds another dimension to the Project’s goal of raising awareness around the medical conflict-of-interest issues that are created when drug companies open their wallets to influence prescribing. The Prescription Project Weekly Reader, an e-newsletter that highlights relevant news stories of the week, will continue its regular circulation. You can sign up to receive the Weekly Reader at the Prescription Project website, www.prescriptionproject.org, where you can also find project news, press releases and media resources, and information on upcoming events.

We wish them the best of luck! Welcome to the pharmablogosphere!

An excellent op-ed ran this week in the San Francisco Chronicle, “Prescription mining raises millions for doctors’ group.” It highlights the American Medical Association’s sale of physician profiles and data to drug companies, to help those drug companies convince doctors to prescribe the most expensive brand-name drugs over cheaper and often equally effective older and generic drugs.

As the op-ed points out, most doctors aren’t even aware that their information is sold — not just by the AMA, but by pharmacies as well. When one of the 100,000 drug salespeople that blanket the country enters a doctor’s office, they know exactly how many prescriptions the doctor has written for their drug and for those of their competitors. And they know how the doctor’s prescribing habits changed since their last visit — so they can figure what messages worked, and didn’t work, with that particular doctor.

If most doctors aren’t aware of this, you can be sure that most patients aren’t aware of it either. Drug companies try to portray their salespeople as providing an “informational” and “educational” service, but that’s a red herring. The goal of the salesperson to sell their drug — not to educate the doctor on the most effective and cost-effective treatment.

It’s high time that doctors kicked the drug salespeople out of their offices and instead relied on independent information about drugs. Some doctors and medical centers have done just this. Getting Academic Medical Centers to adopt better policies about drug salespeople is one of the goals of the Prescription Project, whose director, Rob Restuccia, is one of the authors of this op-ed. (The Prescription Project is a project of Community Catalyst, which is also PAL’s parent organization)

No Free Lunch now has a directory of doctors who refuse to see drug salespeople — go here to check to see if your doctor’s name is in it. If he or she isn’t, why not ask them to take the no-drug-salespeople pledge at your next appointment?

Here’s the op-ed that ran this week:

Prescription mining raises millions for doctors’ group

Robert Restuccia and Lydia Vaias

Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Drug companies care about what your doctor prescribes just as much as you do – and they’re paying big money to find out. They are paying so much, in fact, that even though the vast majority of physicians disapprove of the sale of their personal prescribing data for marketing purposes, the American Medical Association persists in selling detailed physician information to the pharmaceutical industry. This data must be used for legitimate public health research – not brand promotion.

Drug ads cover doctors’ offices, coating everything from wall calendars and paperweights to stethoscopes and prescription pads. The numbers show that these advertisements work: doctors are prescribing more brand-name, higher-cost drugs than ever before.

One of the less obvious but more intrusive marketing tools is the drug rep’s hand-held computer, which contains a detailed profile of your doctor’s prescribing history. Armed with the knowledge of each doctor’s individual prescribing habits, pharmaceutical sales representatives tailor their pitches to each physician. This strategy has resulted in new, costlier drugs replacing established medications that have proven histories of safety and effectiveness. Industry profits swell, as do the nation’s health care costs.

Few people recognize the role the AMA plays in making physician information available to companies that use it for pharmaceutical marketing purposes. The AMA sells information from its physician “Masterfile” to health information organizations that pair the identifying information with prescribing records from pharmacies and sell the whole package to pharmaceutical companies, a practice commonly called “prescription data-mining.”

The AMA profits handsomely from this agreement. In 2005, the AMA made more than $44 million from the sale of database products, approximately 16 percent of its budget. It comes as no surprise, then, that the sale of prescriber information failed to make the formal agenda when AMA delegates met in Chicago last month.

Yet among physicians there is a growing and vigorous debate about the appropriateness of this practice and its enhancement of pharmaceutical marketing. Despite representing less than 30 percent of all U.S. doctors, the AMA keeps identifying information on all licensed physicians – and sells it all. Even so, only 60 percent of physicians surveyed by the Kaiser Family Foundation were aware of the sale of their information. Once told, 74 percent disapproved. Even a survey by the AMA itself found a 66 percent disapproval rate.

A number of policymakers, physician groups and medical societies have come out against this practice in recent years. Leaders include the National Physicians Alliance, the American Medical Student Association, the Vermont Medical Society and the New Hampshire Medical Society. Unfortunately, the AMA has a financial incentive to keep selling this information without regard to how it is being used or the impact it has on patient care and health-care costs.

A growing number of states have taken measures to end data mining because the AMA will not. Maine and Vermont recently passed legislation banning the sale of information detailing what drugs doctors are prescribing their patients while New Hampshire, the first state to pass such legislation, saw the data mining companies challenge the law. A federal court overturned the law banning the sale of prescription information “on free speech” grounds and the case in now being appealed by New Hampshire.

Last year, in response to this growing pressure, the AMA created an “opt-out” measure, called the Prescribing Data Restriction Program. Difficult to navigate, poorly publicized, with only a quarter of physicians are aware of it, and used by less than 1 percent of doctors, the opt-out program is a step toward reform, but a small and inadequate one. The program does not bar the sale of prescriber information to pharmaceutical companies; it merely requests and then relies on the industry to prevent the transmission of this data to its sales teams.

By continuing to profit from the sale of physician data, the AMA has shown itself to be at best, slow-to-act, and at worst, opportunistic at the expense of professional boundaries. The AMA should put medical ethics before profits and stop licensing its Physician Masterfile for pharmaceutical marketing purposes.

Robert Restuccia is the executive director of the Prescription Project, a national initiative supported by the Pew Charitable Trusts to end conflicts of interest created by the pharmaceutical industry’s marketing to physicians. Lydia Vaias serves as president of the National Physicians Alliance and is a board-certified general surgeon on staff at Kaiser Permanente Hospital in Bellflower (Los Angeles County).

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/07/25/EDPRR6D571.DTL

This article appeared on page B – 9 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Prescription Access Litigation’s parent organization, Community Catalyst, today announced “Consumer Voices for Coverage,” a major new initiative to support state health care advocacy in certain states. The program was launched today with a Call for Proposals, and will award grants of up to $750,000 over a three-year period. To learn more, visit voicesforcoverage.org

_____________________________________

Robert Wood Johnson Foundation & Community Catalyst Announce $12M Effort to Support Consumer Advocacy for Health Care Coverage

Jun 15, 2007 – Boston, Mass.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Community Catalyst announced the launch of a $12 million effort to strengthen state consumer health advocacy networks in selected states across the U.S. The national program, Consumer Voices for Coverage, will assist in building a single, integrated health care advocacy network in selected states. The call for proposals was released today.

The new program seeks to strengthen state consumer health advocacy networks through an infusion of new resources, policy support and technical assistance over a three-year period. The Consumer Voices for Coverage program will use a competitive application process and will award grants of up to $750,000 over a three-year period. These new funds will help build effective health care consumer advocacy and infrastructure as critical forces in the health care reform policy-making process.

“For ten years, Community Catalyst has worked to build stronger state health advocacy organizations and achieve improvements in health care policy,” said Susan T. Sherry, deputy director at Community Catalyst and director of Consumer Voices for Coverage. “We have seen the results of state consumer health advocacy in preserving and expanding coverage. This investment by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is both timely and strategic—it will bring state-based consumer advocates to a new level of effectiveness and national influence.”

The program builds on the findings of a report issued last fall by Community Catalyst with funding from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

“Community Catalyst’s report, Consumer Health Advocacy: A View From 16 States, highlighted the importance of consumer advocacy and identified the specific capacities required to build stronger advocacy,” said Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, M.D., M.B.A., president and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. “Health care coverage is a top priority for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and we are committed to supporting the consumer voice for health care reform in this country. There is no better organization to lead this empowerment effort, and we are proud to be a partner with Community Catalyst as it enters its second decade of service to the health care community.”

“There is a new wave of reform coming from state health care advocates and policy-makers—Massachusetts, California, Vermont are all moving on sweeping coverage changes,” Sherry added. “Now is the time to strengthen the consumer voice.”

For details on the program and to view the call for proposals, visit www.voicesforcoverage.org.

About Community Catalyst
Community Catalyst is a national nonprofit advocacy organization working to build the consumer and community leadership that is required to transform the American health system, with the belief that this transformation will happen when consumers are fully engaged and have an organized voice. Community Catalyst has provided leadership and support to state and local consumer organizations, policy-makers, and foundations working to change the health care system so it serves everyone—especially vulnerable members of society since 1997. For more information, visit www.communitycatalyst.org.

About the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation focuses on the pressing health and health care issues facing our country. As the nation’s largest philanthropy devoted exclusively to improving the health and health care of all Americans, the Foundation works with a diverse group of organizations and individuals to identify solutions and achieve comprehensive, meaningful and timely change. For more than 35 years the Foundation has brought experience, commitment, and a rigorous, balanced approach to the problems that affect the health and health care of those it serves. When it comes to helping Americans lead healthier lives and get the care they need, the Foundation expects to make a difference in your lifetime.