free market attitudes. He also said that contraception, which Allergan sells as part of its billion-dollar women’s health business, will remain “an important market.” “Even if the government is less supportive of it”—Republicans want to defund Planned Parenthood—“I don’t think they’ll be openly hostile to it,” he added.
But Saunders, who is on the board of the industry lobbying group PhRMA, said he remained wary of Trump’s populist pronouncements, which the president-elect wielded in the campaign against drug makers.
Allergan says it will not engage in gouging or predatory tactics, like buying drugs with no competition and jacking up their price, or taking big profits just before a drug goes off patent—practices that have raised public ire and gotten executives from Valeant Pharmaceutical, Mylan, and Turing Pharmaceuticals hauled before Congress.
The price-increase pledge isn’t ironclad. If Allergan encounters unexpected costs—such as a big jump in the cost of a drug’s underlying materials, or the FDA requiring large studies to track a drug’s safety once it’s on the market—“we would have to re-examine our commitments,” Saunders said.
Asked whether self-imposed price caps were more a business decision or political calculation, Merck’s Gerberding said her company had a “responsible pricing policy” already. But she acknowledged the drug industry was on the defensive. “Right now the whole industry is being lumped together in the ‘EpiPen’ category,” she said, referring to Mylan’s triple-digit price hikes over seven years for the emergency allergy injection. “We need to differentiate small biotechs from big pharma, and good pharma from bad pharma.”
Photo by Flickr user ollagrafik via a Creative Commons license.
