SALT LAKE CITY — Intermountain Healthcare announced it will be manufacturing its own brand of generic drugs, which could change the dynamic of the generic drug market.
They are calling it Project Rx, and it includes five health systems that involve 450 hospitals nationwide.
During a press conference Thursday morning, Intermountain said they are already fielding calls from other health systems interested in partnering in its endeavor.
Intermountain Healthcare President and CEO Dr. Marc Harrison said they do not want to continue watching patients suffer because they cannot afford certain generic drugs due to their egregious prices.
“In some circumstances drugs have been driven up 1,000 percent … We believe drug prices can be reduced to a fraction of their current costs,” Harrison said.
In the last couple of years, patients have watched companies like Turing Pharmaceuticals, EpiPen, heart medication companies and others manipulate prices and increase them by hundreds of percentages.
“Our goal is to make sure essential generic drugs are available and affordable to everybody,” said Dan Liljenquist, vice president of enterprise and initiative for Intermountain. “So we invite everybody to partner with us. If you think about a successful business, you want to sell your product as broadly and as completely in the market as you can; we also want to make sure we are partnering in such a way that people will share our vision for this company.”
They have another year of studying the market and say they are working with scholars across the nation to find generic drug problems.
Read the full story here: Fox13Now.com.
Written by DANICA LAWRENCE, Fox13Now.com.
Copyright 2018, KSTU. A Tribune broadcasting station.
then again, maybe they see that generic makers can charge whatever arbitrary amount they want and IHC wants to get a piece of the action. muh free markuts!!! muh capitalism $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
Wow, what a negative Nelly. You take good news and squash it like a bug. Puke. Go find your ‘free stuff’ that just magically appears.
ok whiner, I thought about it. The conclusion: IHC is not around to give freebies or discounts. They are there solely to make a profit. If u think otherwise then ur out of touch, or just an idiot….
We should applaud this initiative, since it puts these healthcare providers in a better negotiating position for generic equivalent supplies.
There are dozens of examples of PharMA companies making token tweaks to tried and true formulations to extend their patent protection, thanks to your Senator Hatch and his support of his campaign contributors. And of course there are examples like Turing and Epi-Pen which don’t even fake a re-formulation and just hike prices. These are short-term gimmicks since many of these products can be created by generic pharma companies with modest investments, creating a competitive product.
As Consumer Reports (and others) keeps reminding us, we need to ask our prescribing physician if there is a generic equivalent to what they prescribe, and if so, what are we missing out by not taking the latest and greatest formulation. In many cases, the answer is next to nothing, but certainly exceptions exist.
I wonder if the savings of these ‘house brand’ generics will be passed on to patients, or will they just be working completely for a profit motive. LIke will they supply themselves with these drugs and then just charge the going rate of what other makers are charging.
The answer to all this bs is to pass laws to allow medicaid and medicare to negotiate drug prices. Politicians are too embedded with the pharma lobby to ever allow that to happen
Excellent comment, CE.
They could pass on the savings the same as they do with Select Health!!!….oh sorry about that, they’re the “we pay NOTHING insurance company!!