Four pharma companies ‘worked together to inflate a drug price 700% in just ...

View
comments

Four pharmaceutical companies have been accused of breaking the law to fleece the NHS out of millions of pounds.

Firms called Alliance, Focus, Lexon and Medreich allegedly agreed for only one of them to sell a particular anti-nausea drug so it could hike up the price.

The Government's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) accused the firms of working together to inflate the price of a drug by 700 per cent in four years.

The medicine, called prochlorperazine, is prescribed by the NHS to treat nausea and dizziness – last year more than 6.2million of the dissolvable tablets concerned were prescribed.

If found guilty the firms could be fined as much as £35million by the British Government.

'The NHS should not be denied the opportunity of benefitting from an increased choice of suppliers, or lower prices, for important medicine,' said Ann Pope, a senior director at the CMA.

'Agreements where a company pays a rival not to enter the market can lead to higher prices and deprive the NHS of huge savings that often result from competition between drug suppliers.'

The CMA alleges that Focus Pharmaceuticals paid Lexon and Medreich not to sell prochlorperazine 3mg dissolvable tablets.

This made Focus the only supplier of the medication, which was produced by Alliance, allowing it to bump up the price as much as it liked.

It increased the price from £6.49 for a pack of 50 in 2013 to £51.68 for the same size pack in 2017, the CMA claims.

During the same period, the amount the NHS spent on the drugs rose from £2.7m to £7.5, even though it was prescribing fewer of them – suggesting millions of pounds were wasted.