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Courtesy of the Times.
A multimillionaire businessman whose company’s drug price rises have cost the NHS £50 million was appointed OBE in the new year’s honours list, The Times can reveal. Vijay Patel, 69, set up a company that exploited a loophole in health service rules to increase the price of old medicines for which it was the sole supplier by up to 2,500 per cent. The firm, Atnahs, raised the price of a packet of antidepressants from £5.71 to £154. An insomnia treatment now costs more than £138 instead of £12.10.
Although the practice was exposed in 2016 by a front-page Times investigation, prices have not been reduced. The increases meant that seven of the company’s medicines alone cost the NHS an extra £16.3 million in 2017. Despite this, Mr Patel was appointed OBE last week for his “services to business and philanthropy”. His name was listed among more than 1,000 people given honours. Others receiving the OBE included three senior NHS staff who led the responses to terrorist attacks in Manchester and London. The decision to include Mr Patel on the list designed to recognise those who have “committed themselves to serving and helping Britain” has prompted an outcry from doctors and pharmacists. It will also raise questions about vetting by the independent committee that makes decisions on honours.
Jon Trickett, shadow minister for the Cabinet Office, said: “It is an outrage that someone can be honoured for business and philanthropy when they have allegedly taken money out of our NHS through loopholes in the rules.” The Labour MP said that there was “absolutely no circumstance in which such behaviour should be rewarded”. Andrew Hill, an expert on drug pricing and senior research fellow at the University of Liverpool, said: “At a time of acute shortages in the NHS, why are we rewarding the owner of a company which overcharged the NHS by millions of pounds?” He added that the high prices charged by Atnahs were an “ongoing problem”.
The abuse of NHS pricing rules by companies including Atnahs and Amdipharm, a company co-founded by Mr Patel and sold to a private equity firm for £367 million in 2012, led to the government changing the law. The companies exploited rules that allowed them to drop brand names from old medicines and sell them as unbranded generics. The NHS relies on market forces to set the prices of such drugs but the companies were typically the sole supplier, allowing them to charge what they wished.