Fed Up With Drug Companies, Hospitals Decide to Start Their Own<br />Several major hospital systems, including Ascension, a Catholic system<br />that is the nation’s largest nonprofit hospital group, plan to form a new nonprofit company, that will provide a number of generic drugs to the hospitals.<br />“We are not indicting an entire industry.”<br />Dr. Kevin A. Schulman, a professor of medicine at the Duke University School of Medicine who has studied the generic drug market and is advising the effort, said: “If they all agree to buy enough to sustain this effort, you will have a huge threat to people<br />that are trying to manipulate the generic drug market.<br />We are going to go ahead and try and fix it.”<br />While Intermountain executives would not name the drugs they intend to make, hospitals have long experienced shortages of drugs<br />like morphine or encountered sudden price increases for old, off-patent products like the heart medicine Nitropress.<br />A group of large hospital systems plans to create a nonprofit generic drug company to battle shortages and high prices.<br />“We’re seeing an acceleration of both shortages and escalation of prices,” said Dr. Richard Gilfillan, the chief executive of Trinity Health, a large Catholic system<br />that operates in nearly two dozen states and is part of the group.
