Deby Provost of Stockton, California has one question: If her drug for multiple sclerosis has been around for 20 years, why does it cost so much? It's a question that Congress is asking, too.
This summer, two congressmen on the House Committee for Oversight and Government Reform sent a letter to a number of pharmaceutical companies, asking why drugs like Deby's had gone up so steeply. They said Deby's drug, Avonex, had gone up 889 percent over the last two decades.
But the answer to Deby's question is complicated.
"One of the things you find when you look back in the history of pharmaceuticals in American life is the sense that they have always been becoming untenable expensive," says Professor Jeremy Greene, who studies the pharmaceutical costs at Johns Hopkins University.
He traces some of Deby's trouble to the unintended consequences of one of the most successful pieces of drug pricing legislation ever passed: The Hatch Waxman Act. He joins The Takeaway to explain why.
