Corporations celebrating GOP win

Corporate American must be celebrating the GOP victories, because the Healthcare reform push initiated by Hillary Clinton a long time ago and pushed by Obama might be pushed back or buried. Further, deregulation and no-regulation will be the order of the day- sweet music to Corporate America. Genentech will be celebrating, so will be Pfizer and others.

Genentech Offers Secret Rebates to Promote Lucentis - NYTimes.com: "Genentech has begun offering secret rebates to eye doctors as an apparent inducement to get them to use more of the company’s expensive drug Lucentis rather than a less costly alternative.

Under the program, which started on Oct. 1, medical practices can earn up to tens of thousands of dollars in rebates each quarter if they use a lot of Lucentis and if their usage increases from the previous quarter, according to a confidential document outlining the program that was obtained by The New York Times.

Lucentis, approved in 2006, is mainly used to treat age-related macular degeneration, the leading cause of blindness in the elderly. It costs about $2,000 for each injection, with an injection into the eye needed as often as once a month.

The competition comes from Avastin, another Genentech drug that has the same mode of action. While Avastin is approved only to treat cancer, many retina specialists say it works just as well in the eye as Lucentis. So they are using it off-label because each injection costs only $20 to $50.

Using Avastin instead of Lucentis saves Medicare — and costs Genentech — hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

The rebates are considered a form of volume discount, and have been offered for some other drugs. They are legal if they adhere to certain guidelines.

Still, some doctors said they had ethical concerns about the arrangement.

“There’s no way to look at that without calling it bribery,” said Dr. Greg Rosenthal, a retina specialist in Toledo, Ohio, who has been critical of attempts by Genentech to get doctors to use Lucentis. He is not a participant in the rebate program.

Genentech, which is owned by the Swiss company Roche, said in a statement, “Rebate and discount programs are a common business practice across the industry, including in the field of ophthalmology.” The company said it had such programs for other drugs and that they “help reduce the cost of our medicines for hospitals, pharmacies and doctors.”

Senator Herb Kohl, chairman of the Special Committee on Aging, who has investigated efforts to curtail the use of Avastin in the past, criticized the Lucentis incentives.

“This rebate program appears to be an attempt to reverse the trend of significantly reduced reimbursements that Genentech has been receiving from Medicare for Lucentis,” Mr. Kohl, a Democrat from Wisconsin, said in a statement. “I am highly doubtful that Medicare will benefit in any way from the rebates being offered to doctors.”"