Richard Gonzalez, chairman and chief executive officer of AbbVie Inc., during a Senate Finance Committee hearing on drug pricing on Capitol Hill on Feb. 26, 2019.WASHINGTON — Pharmaceutical company AbbVie significantly inflated prices over the past two decades for patients in the U.S. who take the drugs Humira and Imbruvica, a report released Tuesday by the House Oversight and Reform Committee found.led to billions of dollars in corporate revenue and hefty bonuses for company executives.
Meanwhile, AbbVie, in conjunction with Janssen Biotech, has increased the price of Imbruvica, a drug used to treat mantle cell lymphoma and other cancers, by 82 percent since it launched in 2013. That year, for a patient taking three pills per day, the drug was priced at $99,776 annually. Today, it’s priced at $181,529. For patients taking four pills each day, it costs $242,039.
The committee also noted that Medicare is banned from negotiating with drug companies to lower prices and if Medicare received the same discounts for the medications as the Department of Defense and Department of Veterans Affairs, taxpayers would have saved several billion dollars.
The US is a failed state. What other “first world” country allows corporations to run amok and extort their population for profit?