AARP said Tuesday that the prices of drugs used most widely by older Americans rose by nearly 26 percent from 2005 to 2009, nearly twice the rate of inflation. The Times reported:

    The increase happened even as the price of generic drugs, which account for the vast majority of prescriptions, has been falling in recent years, the report found. “At a time when our country is contracting economically and inflation is really, really low, inflation in the cost of prescription drugs is going in the other direction,” said Cheryl Matheis, the senior vice president for policy strategy at AARP, whose members are 50 and older. “The word we use is relentless because it just doesn’t seem to abate.”

    But officials in the pharmaceutical industry criticized the report, saying that the expanded availability of generic drugs has slowed the increase in drug prices in recent years. “AARP has released yet another misleading pricing report that ignores key facts about the marketplace for prescription medicines and paints an inaccurate picture of prescription drug spending in the U.S.,” the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the industry trade and lobbying group, said in a statement Tuesday.

    The AARP report, which examined the retail prices of the 514 brand name and generic drugs most widely used by Medicare recipients, said that the price of generic drugs fell by nearly 31 percent from 2005 to 2009. But at the same time that brand-name drug prices grew by nearly 41 percent and specialty drugs rose more than 48 percent. The rate of inflation, by contrast, grew by just over 13 percent over the same period.

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