Several UK health groups on Wednesday accused big pharmaceutical companies of extracting about 11.9-12.6 billion pounds of excess profits from the NHS England for its 10 super-expensive drugs used for cancer, arthritis and blood clots.
As per latest figures, NHS England has spent 13 billion pounds on just 10 super-expensive medicines in the 10 years leading up to 2022.
A report by health campaign groups Global Justice Now, STOPAIDS, and Just Treatment shows that the NHS is being charged sky-high prices for key drugs, even after accounting for reasonable levels of profit.
This includes an estimated mark-up of 23,000 per cent on cancer drug lenalidomide, even assuming a reasonable profit margin of up to 50 per cent.
The health groups have called the figures “evidence of profiteering”, as the drugs could have been made for a small fraction of the price charged to the NHS.
They said that big drug firms are also lobbying against a drugs pricing system that has already helped the NHS save 7 billion pounds in the past five years — between 2018 and 2023.
“These figures show that we have a broken model of producing medicines, with pharmaceutical companies ripping off the NHS at every turn. Unless we fix it, our health system could be at risk,” said Nick Dearden, Director of Global Justice Now, in a statement
Further, the report noted that very few of these drugs could reasonably be said to have been fully invented by the companies that now market them.
Each of the 10 drugs analysed in the report benefited from work by scientists from public institutions, from public funding, from charitable funding or in some cases a mixture of all three.
The campaigners demand a new model for making medicines which includes strict conditions on the use of medicines made thanks to public money to safeguard affordability and sharing of medical knowledge.
They also called for more public manufacturing capacity and enforcement of anti-monopoly powers to prevent the dominance of a handful of massive players.
“Currently, money we need to keep the NHS going is being poured into pockets of wealthy shareholders of big drug corporations. If we want new, breakthrough medicines, which benefit all of us, we need to put a stop to this profiteering and take control of medicines which, very often, public money has already helped to create,” Dearden said.
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