How 2015 became the year of drug price outrage

Prescription drug prices, always a hot-button issue, reached the boiling point this year after several small pharmaceutical companies bought the rights to established lifesaving drugs and jacked up prices by huge margins.

The man who exemplified pharmaceutical greed, Martin Shkreli, captured the nation’s attention as a calculating, grinning villain who acquired the rights to Daraprim, a half-century-old drug that treats patients suffering from deadly parasites, and raised the price overnight by about 5,000 percent.

The cost of branded drugs outpaced inflation for the 10th consecutive year, and spending on complex specialty drugs, like those for cancer and hepatitis C, increased nearly 27 percent, according to a report by PricewaterhouseCoopers in Chicago.

A Gallup poll in September ranked the pharmaceutical industry 23rd out of 25 industries, above only oil and gas and the federal government.

“Public anger over the unacceptably high prices charged by pharmaceutical companies in the U.S. has reached unprecedented levels,” said Dr. Michael Carome, director of the health research group at Public Citizen, a nonprofit consumer rights advocacy group.

Republican Donald Trump called Turing’s steep price increases of the antiparasitic drug Daraprim “disgusting,” and Republican Marco Rubio called soaring drug prices “pure profiteering.”

Clinton’s plan would cap monthly and annual out-of-pocket costs for prescription drugs to help patients with chronic or serious health problems.

Both Clinton and Sanders would require Medicare to use its bargaining power to negotiate for better prices with pharmaceutical companies, a practice now banned by law — a move strongly opposed by Big Pharma.

[...] Congress recently passed a funding bill that requires the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Veterans Affairs to study how much they are spending on drugs.

“I think it’s going to put increased pressure on the pharmaceutical industry to act voluntarily to lower prices, or it might be forced by the government and private payers to do so,” said Amy Dow, a health care lawyer at Epstein Becker Green in Chicago.