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Having avoided the bullet of price controls in the new Medicare Rx drug law, pressure on drugmakers to lower the cost of their products may come from this year’s presidential election, with lower drug costs being second only to national security as a top concern among voters, experts say.
The new Medicare prescription drug law is setting up a highly competitive market that will result in vigorous price negotiations between drug manufacturers and healthcare plans, according to PhRMA officials.
Although the newly enacted Medicare drug benefit contains no price control mechanism, the pharmaceutical industry will likely come under new political pressure to lower drug costs — an issue that is second only to national security as a top concern among voters, experts say.
The FTC and the Justice Department have asked parties who filed electronic comments on the agencies’ joint hearings on healthcare and competition policy last year to resubmit them due to technological problems that prevented the original filings from being received.
Generic firm Synthon has settled a patent dispute with GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) that paves the way for Synthon to launch a variation of GSK’s profitable antidepressant Paxil (paroxetine HCl).
Eon Labs last week launched the first generic version of GlaxoSmithKline’s (GSK’s) antidepressant Wellbutrin SR 100-mg strength tablets, a move that triggered a GSK-authorized generic version of the drug marketed by Watson Pharmaceuticals.
After three years of legal challenges that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, Maine on Saturday launched its prescription drug discount plan that uses the state’s buying power under Medicaid to leverage lower prices from manufacturers.
In an action that suggests how the FTC might view other mergers of drug companies with competing preclinical research programs for rare diseases, the commission has closed its investigation into Genzyme’s 2001 acquisition of Novazyme Pharmaceuticals.
Due to income that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) says was improperly shifted to other countries, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) allegedly owes the U.S. government $2.7 billion in unpaid taxes, the company confirmed last week.