US senate panel launches bipartisan probe into pharmaceutical pricing

A US senate panel yesterday launched a bipartisan probe into pharmaceutical pricing. The panel has called for documents from four drug makers including Valeant Pharmaceuticals and Turing Pharmaceuticals, over controversial price hikes on lifesaving drugs.

According to a statement from the panel's Republican chairwoman Susan Collins and Claire McCaskill, its top Democrat, the Senate's Special Committee on Aging also requested information from Retrophin Inc and Rodelis Therapeutics.

Furthermore yesterday Democratic members of a US House of Representatives investigative committee asked Republicans to call a vote to subpoena Valeant and Turing.

The Democratic members also called for an investigation of drug prices in September, over  press reports of a 5000 per cent plus overnight increase in a toxoplasmosis drug made by Turing (See: Turing vows to cut Daraprim drug price after furore over 5,000% hike) and an over 600 per cent increase in a blood pressure treatment from Valeant.

Turing Pharmaceuticals, a small US company that generated outrage over raising the cost of an old anti-infective drug by more than 5,000 per cent, had said it would roll back that increase to make sure it remains affordable, but had yet to do so.

The investigation, as also the news that Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton found the hikes "outrageous" and the release of her plan to restrict drugmaker profits, hit the company's stock prices. 

According to drug makers and their defenders, drugs were priced to help enable discovery and development of innovative new treatments.

According to commentators, the Republic effort had not been broadly taken up by the party and investors and analysts said, it would take a wider bipartisan push to possibly change how drugmakers priced their medicines.

Meanwhile, Democrats on the House Oversight Committee are blaming chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) for blocking their efforts to investigate price hikes by two pharmaceutical companies.

"My constituents are dying," ranking member Elijah E Cummings (D-Md.) said at a news conference last morning. "They are dying because they cannot get a cure."

In a letter to Chaffetz, Cummings and other members said Republicans had "refused every request" to hold hearings or issue subpoenas to drug companies.

"Even if you have no interest in investigating these abuses on behalf of your own constituents, we ask that you not block us from investigating them on behalf of ours," they have asked Republicans.