By James Rowley
The Seattle Times
December 17, 2008
Antitrust enforcers accused Ovation Pharmaceuticals of cornering the U.S. market on a drug for a congenital heart defect in premature infants and asked a court to break up the company’s monopoly on the medication.
Ovation, based in Deerfield, Ill., purchased the rights to Indocin from Merck in August 2005. The FTC said Ovation then bought the rights to NeoProfen from Abbott Laboratories in January 2006.
As soon as it acquired NeoProfen, Ovation raised the $36 price it had been charging hospitals for each vial of Indocin to about $500, the FTC alleged in its complaint. Ovation set a price of $483 a vial for NeoProfen when it started selling the drug in July 2006, the FTC said.
The two drugs are the only alternative to risky surgery to treat a condition known as patent ductus arteriosus in which a blood vessel connecting two heart arteries fails to close.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2008528981_ftc17.html
Comment:
By Don McCanne, MD
Imagine if we had a publicly-financed and publicly-administered national health program covering everyone that included a comprehensive drug benefit. Would we be reading this story? Of course not. This does not mean that pharmaceutical firms will not engage in other criminal activities, but this one would have been prevented if we had a rational system of financing health care.
This one isn’t only about money; it’s about the soul of our health care system. It is about a pharmaceutical company that merely bought rights to products developed by others and then used those rights to egregiously extort innocent premature infants who had the misfortune of being born with a patent ductus arteriosus.
Depending on antitrust enforcers to establish health policy doesn’t seem like a smart way to run a health care system. With a single payer national health program we’d be able to eliminate many of the causes of excessive spending that often brings us only mediocrity in health care. Leaving the middlemen money managers in place will never allow us to achieve a high-performance system at a reasonable cost. Yet our national policy makers are determined to protect these middlemen no matter how much it costs us both in dollars and in tradeoffs in beneficial health policies.