Hydroxyprogesterone - preventing pre-term birth

Big Pharma's naked greed on display

SHAMELESS!

I've never seen anything like it: A drug company has taken a treatment used for more than 50 years, slapped a patent on it, jacked up the price 15,000 percent... and then threatened to sue anyone who keeps making and selling the tried-and-true version.

It's a hormone called hydroxyprogesterone, and until now women at risk of a preterm birth were able to get it from a compounding pharmacist for $10-$15 a shot.

Now, for reasons that defy all logic, the feds have given KV Pharmaceutical Company the patent for this decades-old treatment, which will be sold under the name Makena.

And if you're facing a preterm birth yourself, you can now get this shot for just $1,500 a pop.

Since most women need 20 injections, that's $30,000 for a full treatment for something we KNOW can be sold profitably for $10 a shot.

But you won't find it at that price anymore -- the company has already set their lawyers loose on compounding pharmacists, warning them to stop making it... or else.

Think that's bad? That's nothing -- because believe it or not, that's not even the biggest outrage here.

Ready for it? The company itself hasn't spent a red penny getting this drug tested -- all the research behind it was done already, including one study from the National Institutes of Health.

That's right... YOU paid for that one.

The company says it's going to foot the bill for new research, but c'mon -- this is obscene by any measure.

At this point, it's fair to wonder how the March of Dimes feels about all this. That's their thing -- preventing preterm births, right?

They're just fine with it!

"The drug is expensive but it's a very important drug for a very important purpose," Dr. Alan Fleischman, March of Dimes medical director, told Time magazine.

Expensive? He seems to have forgotten the part where it was doing just fine at $10 a shot.

Meanwhile, Time says the charity just so happened to receive "hundreds of thousands of dollars" from the KV subsidiary that's going to market this drug.

That's a lot of dimes.

Dropping a dime,

William Campbell Douglass II, M.D.