Posts Tagged: "drug prices"

A Fleeting Glimpse of Reason in the Drug Development Debate

Despite the difficulties, the private sector is far and away the best bet for developing the desperately needed medicines of the future. Government is a critical partner and can fund research at our universities and federal laboratories that can’t be done anywhere else. It can also remove some, but not all of the risk inherent in developing treatments for diseases lacking sufficient market size and stability to attract traditional investment. But it still requires a company willing to assume the burden of transforming a discovery into a product that can alleviate suffering.

Focus on Stronger IP Incentives: Price Setting is Not the Cure for Healthcare Spending

The WHO is gathering governments, academics and activists in Amsterdam next month to discuss price setting options for medicines. But the so-called Fair Pricing Forum ignores the main driver of higher healthcare spending and will do more harm than good. While there is a pressing need to balance access to affordable medicines and the incentives to innovate, a reactionary focus on prices is misdirected and could have dire consequences for pharmaceutical innovation… The WHO’s exclusive focus on price setting also misses the mark on another issue – medicines are working to extend lives and even to lower overall healthcare spending by eliminating the need for more expensive interventions, such as surgery and hospitalization.

Will President Trump directly negotiate Medicare prescription drug pricing?

The savings impact of directly negotiated drug costs is considered negligible, but intrusion into biomedical pricing will destabilize life science commercialization… Any way you slice it, added commercialization uncertainty resulting from even negligible savings will be seen by the private sector as a foot-in-the-door for more government price controlling… Participants in early stage life science development including research universities and medical centers must watch this issue closely and be ready to join MMA’ s more conspicuous defenders if and when MMA’s ban on Medicare direct negotiations suddenly appears.

Winning the Drug Development Debate

We create two new companies around academic inventions every day of the year. The critical role such companies play in drug development is clear. The successful integration of public research institutions into the economy is based on the Bayh-Dole Act, which inserted the incentives of patent ownership into the government R&D system. Not a single new drug had been developed from NIH funded research under the patent destroying policies preceding Bayh-Dole. No one is going to spend billions of dollars and more than a decade of effort turning early stage inventions into new drugs or fund a life science startup company without strong patent protection. Yet the patent system and Bayh-Dole are precisely what the critics seek to undermine.

The EpiPen Episode’s Silver Lining

EpiPen’s eruptive timing was important. Had Congress been in town, lawmakers would have filled the front pages with populist blather. Had Mylan been less forthcoming about the retail drug supply chain, the press would have been less likely to look into its composition. Had Mylan’s CEO not been a sitting Senator’s daughter, gossipy Hill reporters would have been bored. If health insurer withdrawals from ACA exchanges had not led to higher consumer costs and rates to match, and most important, if anaphylaxis did not simultaneously threaten the lives so many children and bust the back-to-school budgets of more than 15 million middle American families, the multi component drug pricing issues might have been buried on news papers’ back pages. EpiPen pulled these issues out of hiding into the light of public concern where oversimplified self-serving solutions tend to wilt. The fact is we have been treated to a highly publicized health pricing tutorial using a live case study to learn about the many drivers of retail drug pricing.