The pharmaceutical price fixing scheme

The Office of Fair Trading is expected to expose the extents to which the NHS will go to waste money. Incredibly, the Department of Health has been cosying up to the big pharmaceutical companies and paying well over the odds for drugs with our money! Why is this not plastered all over the front pages??

The scam basically revolves around the PPRS (pharmaceutical price regulation scheme) that prevents drug companies from making excessive profits from the NHS, by effectively capping them. However, within that profit margin, any new drugs can be charged out at as much as they want. This has been quoted in the Guardian as high as £40k per patient per year for some new drugs. So what does a company do if it’s going to make a load of cash from a new drug? It passes its rights to older drugs to other companies who haven’t reached their cap yet. This is costing us millions each year. Yet another reason why the NHS is in serious need of reform.