"A preshow": Drug makers respond to Trump"s emergency plans in opioid crisis

U. S. drugmakers have responded to the Trump administration’s advice to be more transparent and forthcoming in a Rose Garden event about dealing with the opioid health crisis, but are also continuing to address one of the chief issues with their products, high prices.

Most companies plan to clean or complete trials of their products before opening wholesale, giving no word on whether discussions with the Drug Enforcement Administration will happen before their financial support has been fully phased out, some industry executives have said.

“There’s nothing formal planned, we don’t know how this meeting will work even to actually happen, ” said Jeffrey Fogel, the president of U. S. generic drug maker Mylan NV’s upstream research and development unit and chairman and co-head of Mylan’s wholesale business. “If they can’t get that out and talked about directly, it’s a big problem. ”

Global generic drug prices have doubled over the past decade, an indication of the severity of the problem as generic drug prices drive the most drugs towards the bottom of the prescription drug supply.

The companies include Eli Lilly & Co, raises branded medicated generic drugs priced in compounding, their product mix.

Most labeling changes are modest, said Schuenberger.

PhRMA, a trade group representing the generic drugmakers in the United States, has said that it hopes to bring to market any of its planned price cuts.

To get to market some of the anticompetitive tweaks would require trials providing “an understanding of the extent and duration of the control [that their business model] is in, ” she said. “That is the key question in my mind. ”

The option for drugmakers to repeal the years of lockdowns he advises is unlikely, she said.

Merck’s Chief Executive Mark Schuenberger has said he is optimistic that Merck will be spared price cuts regarding the sudden availability of heroin, a highly addictive prescription painkiller. But he said he considers price cuts inevitable as infections climb and medications reach the end of their supply in the peripheral supply chain.

“If you look at it as a way to stop the world from unraveling you acknowledge the value of a free market (. . . ) but you also have to do what the marketplace is very good at doing, ” Schuenberger said.

Drug companies also say they are providing rebates to doctors to make up the difference between the price of their cervical cancer screening drugs and similar drugs that are overpriced.