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Biotech / Medical : Mylan Labs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Druggist who wrote (343)	7/15/1998 8:38:00 AM
From: David Lawrence	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 384

Drug Firm Mylan Blames Its Rivals For Triple-Digit Price Increases WASHINGTON -(Dow Jones)- The head of generic-drug company Mylan Laboratories Inc., whose triple-digit price increases sent up howls of protest in pharmacies and in Congress this year, said Tuesday it is his competitors who are gouging consumers. Mylan almost single-handedly distorted the national producer price index in May with an increase of nearly 400% on one drug. Mylan CEO Milan Puskar said he was forced to raise prices because of unfair tactics on the part of brand-name drug manufacturers to keep generic competitors at bay. Developers of new drugs have exclusive patent rights for 17 years, after which generic manufacturers such as Mylan can replicate the drug and usually sell it for half the original price. Puskar accused brand-name drug makers of a transparent game of keep-away as they use legal maneuvers to delay giving up their lucrative patents, the Associated Press reported. Delays have cost consumers more than $500 million, he claimed. Legal costs of nearly $1.2 million a month fighting such shenanigans helped persuade Puskar he needed to raise prices or risk going out of business, he said. "We had to. We had no choice," Puskar said at a news conference where he called on Congress to close loopholes in the law governing generic drugs and punish drug companies that abuse the system. But Mylan's stratospheric price increases on such drugs as lorazepam, a generic tranquilizer, prompted Rep. Fortney Pete Stark (D-Calif.) to ask the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission to investigate. Mylan raised the wholesale price of its generic version of the drug, brand-named Ativan, from $16.95 for 100 five-milligram pills to $64.31 this spring, which had the extraordinary effect of distorting the national producer price index for May. Puskar denied competitors' claims that his company cornered the market for some raw materials before raising prices on more than a dozen drugs. Pittsburgh-based Mylan is one of the nation's leading generic drug makers and so far the only member of a new lobbying group, the Campaign for Fair Pharmaceutical Competition, which Puskar said will fight to protect consumer rights. "He's being duplicitous," said Jeff Trewhitt, spokesman for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, a brand-name industry group. "It's a smokescreen to cover for his price increases." In general, drug prices have been well-behaved since President Clinton singled out the industry for criticism in 1993. But because of the high financial stakes, protecting brand-name drugs from competition by generics is an aggressive area for Washington lobbying. Last fall, for example, Bristol-Myers Squibb led a proposal to pay the government to extend the patents on such top-selling drugs as its cancer treatment Taxol, with 1997 sales of $860 million and Schering-Plough's allergy medicine Claritin, with sales of $908 million. Manufacturers proposed to pay the National Institutes of Health about 3 percent of the drugs' profits in return for freezing out generic competition for another five years, but the attempt failed. The previous year, the maker of the painkiller Lodine unsuccessfully sought to piggyback a two-year patent extension onto a health insurance bill, in exchange for a $20 million payment. Meanwhile, DuPont Merck spent last year lobbying state legislatures in an attempt to protect the market of its blood thinner, Coumadin, by arguing that the brand-name product was safer for consumers than the generic equivalent. Copyright (c) 1998 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.