Julia Belluz · Friday, February 03, 2017, 8:41 am
Where’s the outrage?
In 1971, the Food and Drug Administration approved the first drug that could reverse a heroin or opioid overdose. More than 40 years later, makers of this drug, called naloxone, are cashing in on the nation’s opioid painkiller and heroin epidemic and price-gouging consumers.
According to a group of researchers, the cost of one package of Evzio — a branded version of the lifesaving injection — has quickly risen from $690, when it hit the market in 2014, to $4,500. Evzio is the first auto-injector formulation, which means anybody, not just first responders or doctors, can easily use it to save their own lives or the lives of others.
That’s not all. The researchers, who studied the rising price of naloxone for a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine, found price hikes in other formulations of the drug: An injectable by Hospira has increased in price from $62.29 in 2012 to $142.49 today, while a nasal spray version of naloxone by Amphastar now costs $39.60 — a 95 percent surge since 2014.
Drug overdoses kill more people than car crashes and gun violence in America, and these overdose antidotes have never been more important. But they’re also quickly becoming more unreachable for the people whose deaths they could avert.
Drugmakers do this because they can
Kaleo, the drug company behind Evzio, says the price increases are justified because of its easy-to-use and life-saving delivery system, as Shefali Luthra at Kaiser Health News reports. But, Luthra adds, the jump in price is “way out of step with production costs.”
Read more
http://www.vox.com/2017/2/3/14490804/kaleo-evzio-price-hike-opioid-epidemic
This blog will focus on political images I have found all around the Internet, though I will intersperse some commentary and quotes that I find interesting.
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