Author: Lynne Taylor

The Welsh Assembly Government has hired a team of corporate investigators to probe allegations that a group of pharmaceutical companies formed a cartel to fix the prices of generic drugs and supply them to the National Health Service in Wales at artificially inflated prices.

Growth in US health care spending increased slightly in 2006, advancing by 6.7% compared to 6.5% in 2005 to reach $2.1 trillion or $7,026 per person, the lowest rate of rise since 1999. However, in 2006 the increase in national spending on prescription drugs accelerated for the first time in six years, from 5.8% in 2005 to 8.5% to total $216.7 billion for the year, the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has reported.

UK Members of Parliament have told the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence that it should assess all new medicines as they are launched, in order for doctors to be able to start prescribing “useful and cost effective” drugs as soon as they become available. However, they add that, during this early assessment, a lower cost per quality-adjusted life year (QALY) should be used than the current maximum of around £30,000; if a drug costs more than this, NICE generally says that it should not be prescribed on the National Health Service.

After nine months of fund-raising, the Republican candidate for the US presidency who has received the largest amount from the pharmaceuticals and health care industries is former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, with a total of $260,535 from the two industries, according to the website www.opensecrets.org, which bills itself as “Your Guide to the Money in US Elections”.

The Indian state of Kerala, in the southwest of the country, has announced that new drugs which are not covered by official price controls will be denied a marketing licence if their prices are higher than the cheapest product available in the state in their drug category.