Several top drugmakers have decided to raise prices this month, a few days after a plea from Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar for restraint.
Pfizer has decided to raise prices for more than 40 drugs, with some big ones like Viagra and antidepressant Zoloft getting a price hike of nearly 10 percent. Several other drugmakers also plan to make hikes to their products.
[Opinion: The real prescription for lower drug prices: Get Europe to drop its price controls]
The hikes from several drugmakers come a week after Azar appeared before the Senate Finance Committee to discuss healthcare affordability.
Azar told the panel that he has been disappointed by price hikes and wanted to put drug companies on notice.
“We are hitting July 1, the traditional time for drug price increases,” Azar told the panel. “I hope they will exercise restraint as we come across this period.”
The agency told the Washington Examiner that it is paying close attention to “how all market players are behaving, but this administraiton has made it clear that the status quo is unacceptable,” spokeswoman Caitlin Oakley said. “We will not hesitate to use the authority and the tools we have at our disposal, as set forth in the President’s blueprint on drug prices, to make sure Americans see lower prices and reduced out-of-pocket costs.”
The price hikes come nearly two months after President Trump gave a major address chiding drug companies.
Trump also said about a month ago that drug companies would be voluntarily lowering prices in “two weeks.”
The administration outlined in May a series of primarily administrative changes to tackle high drug prices. But the blueprint primarily focuses on Medicare drug costs.
[Previous coverage: Senate to take up Trump’s call to lower drug prices in June]
For instance, it calls for greater negotiation for drugs covered under Medicare Part B, which covers drugs administered in a doctor’s office like chemotherapy or vaccines.
Critics have said the blue print does not do enough to tackle a drug maker’s ability to set a list price for a product at any rate they choose.
“The problem is the price and, as evidenced by this week’s news, the price is controlled by manufacturers,” said Will Holley, spokesman for the nonprofit Campaign for Sustainable Rx Pricing, which gets funding from insurer and hospital groups.
The recent price hikes also show that “we need long-term, structural relief to fix our broken drug pricing system,” said Ben Wakana, a former Obama administration official who is the executive director of the advocacy group Patients for Affordable Drugs.
Pfizer spokesman Dean Mastrojohn said that the list price for a majority of the company’s medicines remains unchanged.
“We are modifying prices for about 10 percent of our medicines, including some instances where we’re decreasing the price,” he told the Washington Examiner. “List prices do not reflect what most patients or insurance companies pay. We recognize that rising out-of-pocket costs impact the affordability of medicines.”
Pfizer isn’t the only drugmaker to raise prices at the beginning of July.
Drugmaker Seattle Genetics also raised the price of cancer drug Adcetris by nearly 4 percent to $7,375 a vial. Regeneron and Sanofi announced on Tuesday that eczema drug Dupixent will only go up by three percent, according to CNBC.
Regeneron noted in a statement to CNBC that the price hike is lower than the rate of medical inflation. Dupixent was approved last year at an initial cost of $37,000.
