The Survive and Thrive Boomer Guide

Pharmaceutical companies raise the prices of more than 250 drugs as of Jan. 1

Big pharmaceutical corporations, including Gilead, Pfizer, and GlaxoSmithKline, have hiked the prices of more than 250 prescription drugs as of Jan. 1. Annual and biannual price increases on existing medicines have become a standard practice of brand-name pharma corporations, said Steven Knievel, access to medicines advocate for Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy group.

It’s a new decade, but it’s business as usual for prescription drug corporations, Knievel said.

“Tweets and half-baked proposals from President Donald Trump are not stopping Big Pharma from price gouging consumers,” he said.

Top consumer stories for 2019

As usual, most of the end-of-the-year, round-up articles are about national issues or corporations. If consumers are mentioned, it’s usually about how they’re responding to some corporation.

For the most part, it’s been a grim year for consumers. With the Trump administration that is so probusiness and anti-consumer, the not much is happening for consumers that's positive.

1. President Donald Trump is impeached.

We have a president who puts his personal interests above the public interest. He tried to bribe the Ukrainian president to get him to investigate a political rival. As a result, he’s been impeached by the U.S. House of Representatives. This is incredible.

How a percentage of the American can support Trump is a great mystery to me. He and his administration announce anti-consumer proposals almost daily.

In addition, we have a president who lies. Since he was elected, Trump has told more than 15,000 false or misleading claims. In 2019, he’s said that the U.S. economy today is the best in history, he passed the biggest tax cut in history, the U.S. has lost money on trade deficits, article II of the Constitution lets him do whatever he wants, windmills cause cancer, and toilet flushes are up. All are untrue.

2. Consumer rights and programs are under continual attack from President Trump and his administration.

The Republican conservatives want to reduce the size of government and give corporations more power. Almost daily, we read about how the Trump administration has done it or is planning to do it. Some examples include:

• The Trump administration’s decision to roll back light bulb standards will cost consumers billions.
• The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s rule speeding up pork lines and reducing inspectors endangers the lives and safety of consumers and workers. 
• Corporations keep breaking the law due to declining federal prosecutions.
• The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and seven states launch an “innovation network” that will approve new, risky financial products and protect them from enforcement.
• The CFPB fails consumers by not carrying out the payday lending rule.
• Fewer children’s products were recalled in 2018.
• Under Trump, enforcement of consumer financial laws drops sharply, especially in areas with the highest complaints.

The list goes on and on. Government regulations and programs help consumers. Reducing the size of government and slashing consumer regulations just helps corporations make more profits at the expense of consumers.

Corporations keep breaking the law due to declining federal prosecutions

Corporations keep breaking the law, and the U.S. Department of Justice keeps refusing to prosecute them, a Public Citizen report finds. The DOJ’s continued refusal to bring criminal prosecutions against big banks, big pharma, and other big businesses that violate the law has led to a failure to deter repeat offenders, according to the report.

Instead of prosecuting corporations, the DOJ, starting in the early 2000s, has increasingly relied on agreements that prosecutors and corporate defense attorneys negotiate behind closed doors to keep corporations – usually the largest – out of the criminal justice system.

“If the Justice Department wants to deter corporate crime, it must stop bending over backward to protect corporations and start enforcing the law,” said Rick Claypool, a Public Citizen research director and author of the report. “Our country is facing an unprecedented corporate crime wave. To stop it, we must prosecute corporate criminals.”

CVS-Aetna merger harmful to patients, consumer advocates tell the judge

Photo: JJBers

CVS-Aetna lawyers, consumer advocates, and health care organizations gathered Thursday in Washington, D.C., for oral arguments on whether the Department of Justice’s proposed final judgment in the CVS-Aetna merger is in the public interest. 

U.S. Public Interest Research Group, which filed a friend of the court brief with Consumer Action, called CVS’ claim that the merger would reduce prescription drug prices “absurd.”

“CVS is claiming the merger will simultaneously boost profits to investors and help save consumers money,” said Adam Garber, consumer watchdog for U.S. PIRG. “But without an impartial party holding the combined company accountable, it is more likely than not that instead prices will go up, to the detriment of patients.

Prescription prices climbing while President Trump, Congress do little, Public Citizen says

Despite promises from President Donald Trump and prescription corporations, prices for prescriptions have surged during the first six months of 2019. More than 3,400 medications rose an average of 10.5 percent in the first six months of 2019.

Despite presidential tweets and congressional hearings, there is still nothing to prevent prescription companies from sharply increasing prices, said Peter Maybarduk, director of Public Citizen’s Access to Medicines Program.

Lawmakers who have favored only modest reforms need to open their eyes to the routine price gouging pharmaceutical corporations inflict on Americans with impunity, Maybarduk said.

States sue 20 generic drug companies and 15 executives for allegedly conspiring to fix prices for more than 100 drugs

A 44-state coalition of attorneys general is suing Teva Pharmaceuticals and 19 of the nation's largest generic drug manufacturers alleging a conspiracy to increase prices and reduce competition for more than 100 generic drugs.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court, also names 15 individual senior executive defendants, leaders of the conspiracy, who were responsible for sales, marketing, pricing, and operations. The drugs make up billions of dollars of sales in the United States, and the alleged schemes increased prices affecting the health insurance market, taxpayer-funded healthcare programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, and individuals who had to pay artificially-inflated prices for their prescriptions drugs.

All types of drugs were included – tablets, capsules, suspensions, creams, gels, and ointments – as well as many classes of drugs – statins, ace inhibitors, beta blockers, antibiotics, anti-depressants, contraceptives, and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. The drugs treat a range of diseases and conditions from basic infections to diabetes, cancer, epilepsy, multiple sclerosis, HIV, ADHD, and more. In some cases, the coordinated price increases were more than 1,000 percent.

Founder and executives of opioid company convicted of bribing doctors and lying to insurance companies to increase sales

The founder and four former executives of Insys Therapeutics Inc. were convicted Thursday by a federal jury in Boston of bribing medical practitioners to prescribe Subsys, a highly-addictive, fentanyl spray intended for cancer patients, and for defrauding Medicare and private insurance companies.

John Kapoor, Insys founder and former chairman, and other executives of the Arizona-based company could face prison sentences for the felony convictions that run as long as 20 years.

From May 2012 to December 2015, the defendants bribed practitioners, many of whom operated pain clinics, to get them to prescribe Insys’ Subsys to patients often when it wasn’t medically necessary. Subsys is a powerful, under the tongue, rapid-onset opioid used to treat cancer patients suffering intense breakthrough pain.

Drugs that cause uncontrollable behaviors like binging and gambling need stronger labeling, citizens group says

Public Citizen sued the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in federal court Monday over its failure to act on a nearly three-year-old petition seeking a boxed warning in the product labeling for widely used dopamine agonist medications, which can cause compulsive or uncontrollable behaviors.

The 2016 petition called for black box warnings on six dopamine agonist medications – apomorphine, bromocriptine, cabergoline, pramipexole, ropinirole, and rotigotine – that are used to treat Parkinson’s disease, restless leg syndrome, and several other conditions. It also called for the FDA to require that letters be sent to doctors and patients to warn them about the potential risks.

Patients taking a dopamine agonist drug may have up to a 20 times greater risk of impulse-control problems and compulsive behaviors, including pathological gambling and insatiable shopping or eating, than patients not using these medications. In severe cases, these behaviors can have devastating, life-altering effects. Divorces, financial ruin, criminal charges, and suicide attempts have been reported in patients using these medications, according to the petition.

FDA should ban widely used, deadly gout medication, consumer group says

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration should immediately ban the widely used gout medication febuxostat because it poses unique, serious risks – including the risk of dying from cardiovascular disease – and provides no unique benefit, Dr. Michael Carome, director of Public Citizen’s Health Research Group, said Friday. Public Citizen petitioned the FDA to ban the medication in June 2018.

The FDA convened advisory committees in response to a request from Takeda Pharmaceuticals America, maker of the brand name febuxostat product Uloric, for approval to update the medication’s labeling to include results of a recently completed clinical trial. The trial, which involved more than 6,000 gout patients, showed that patients taking febuxostat were significantly more likely to die from cardiovascular causes compared with those receiving the much older gout medication allopurinol.

Initial clinical trials testing febuxostat prior to FDA approval linked the medication to possible increased risks of serious cardiovascular outcomes, including heart attack, stroke, and death. The FDA rejected the medication twice due to these safety concerns before approving it in 2009 on the condition that the manufacturer conduct the now-completed large, post-market clinical trial to further evaluate the cardiovascular risks.

Two more blood pressure medications recalled due to possible cancer risks

Teva Pharmaceuticals is recalling all lots of combination tablets featuring the drugs amlodipine and valsartan and another combination drug featuring amlodipine, valsartan, and hydrochlorothiazide due to an impurity detected.

The impurity is N-nitroso-diethylamine or NDEA, which has been classified as a probable human carcinogen, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

The combination tablets are used for treating high blood pressure. Teva hasn’t received any reports of adverse events signaling a potential link or exposure to valsartan, according to a statement from Teva posted by the FDA.