Armstrong: And I just happened to find it. There was a lawsuit that a, um, generic drug company filed against Celgene, and buried in thousands of pages was an excerpt of a deposition of Celgene’s head of manufacturing. And a lawyer asked him flat out, “What does it cost to make this drug?” And he said 25 cents. And I remember the moment I saw that, I, I knew that it was a big markup involved, but when he said that the cost was 25 cents a pill, and it had always been 25 cents a pill, and it’s still 25 cents a pill, I was just really floored by that...
One of the former sales officials said that internally they thought they could charge whatever they wanted, that cancer patients will pay whatever price the company put on this pill. So there were, from the time Revlimid was approved by the FDA in 2005 to current day, 26 price hikes. So it was a bluff that was called. And for Celgene, it was an incredibly lucrative bet that they made...
https://www.propublica.org/podcast/revlimid-cancer-drugs-fda-healthcare
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