Another drug company unveiled a new strategy for dealing with the drug pricing debate.
Merck & Co. published a report on January 27th called the Pricing Action Transparency Report, which provided details on the average price increase for drugs and vaccines in its portfolio between 2010 and 2016.
The document indicated the average list price change for its product offerings started at 7.4 percent in 2010 hitting a high of 10.5 percent in 2014. Other years saw the list price change hover between 9.2 and 9.8 percent.
Furthermore, the report indicated the average net price change based on wholesale acquisitions minus discounts and rebates varied from 3.4 percent to 6.2 percent whereas average discounts reached 40.9 percent, according to FiercePharma.
Robert McMahon, the president of Merck’s U.S. market, told the Wall Street Journal the company posted these figures because they felt they needed to provide greater transparency into list and net prices since price increases have become an important issue.
Merck didn’t highlight specific drugs in the report, but this announcement follows other drug-makers looking for different approaches to address criticism from the public and politicians on both sides of the aisle over large price hikes for important drugs.
Firms like AbbVie, Takeda, Novo Nordisk, and Allergan have pledged to limit any price raises to annual single-digit percentages while Johnson & Johnson will release their own transparency report sometime this month with a layout similar to Merck’s.
You can view Merck’s chart below. The company plans on updating these numbers every January going forward.
Source: Merck
Filed Under: Drug Discovery
