Johnson & Johnson, the world’s largest health-care company, issued a new report Monday detailing data on its medicines’ price increases. On the report Johnson & Johnson said it raised the list price of its prescription medicines by an average of 8.5% last year and 3.5% after discount.
The report, which J&J says it plans to issue annually, comes as the pharmaceutical industry has once again become in U.S. a national target for its pricing practices.
Drug price was a key issue during presidential election and in January, US President Donald Trump accusing the industry of “getting away with murder” in regards to pricing and also hinted that drugmakers could be forced to bid for government business.
In 2016, J&J says discounts and rebates on its medicines amounted to about $11 billion in the U.S., or a discount rate of 35 percent off the list price. And it says the net increase in the cost of its medicines, of 3.5 percent across its portfolio, is lower than the 4.1 percent rate of medical inflation in the U.S. last year.
Before J&J, other companies issued a transparency report on drug prices: Allergan who announced single-digit price increases for several therapies , Novo Nordisk and AbbVie that have also annouced that they will limit price increases on theri medicines to single-digit percentages annually.
However Americans feel drug prices are a problem. Seventy-seven percent said prescription drug costs were unreasonable in poll in September 2016 and many Americans support actions to keep costs down, the poll found, including allowing the federal government to negotiate with drug companies to lower prices for Medicare.
