First up: #Revlimid, a drug that costs $20k for a 28-day supply. The Committee reviewed more than 50k pages of internal communications & data from 2009 to now. Since Revlimid launched in '05, Celgene raised the price 22 times (1/) oversight.house.gov/sites/democrat…
After Bristol Myers Squibb obtained the rights to Revlimid last November, it raised the price again to $763/pill. The price has tripled in 15 years (2/)
Revlimid is a textbook case of profits over patients (3/)
Internal docs show that pricing decisions were driven "almost exclusively by the need to meet company revenue targets and shareholder earnings goals." Revlimid's revenue fueled a dramatic increase in Celgene's annual profits & contributed to higher bonuses for its execs (4/)
Celgene took advantage of Medicare's inability to negotiate so that it could charge U.S. patients more while giving discounts abroad, internal documents show. Celgene trumpeted the U.S. "free-market pricing." This is not a free market. This is a broken market (5/)
Celgene deployed anti-competitive tactics to block competition and maximize profits (6/)
It suppressed competition by abusing a government-mandated safety program (REMS) & excluding competition by leveraging the U.S. patent system, which Celgene described internally as being "far more protective of its monopoly pricing than patent systems in the rest of the world"
These tactics will cost patients, employers, and taxpayers more than $45 billion through 2025 (7/)
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