Posts Tagged: "Medicare"

On August 28, officials from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce held a video call to discuss the trade organization’s legal action against the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS), including a motion for preliminary injunction filed against the HHS last week in U.S. district court. The U.S. Chamber officials noted that the legal uncertainty looming over the HHS’ implementation of drug price control mechanisms under the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) will cast a significant pall over the Biden Administration’s celebration of the program one year on.

This week on Capitol Hill will include a series of hearings related to tech and innovation topics on Tuesday at the House of Representatives, where debate will focus on the 2020 budget for NASA and the National Institutes of Health, as well as on technology issues at Veterans Affairs. Senate hearings will take a look at Alzheimer’s research and funding for the Department of Energy. On Wednesday, the Senate IP Subcommittee will hold a hearing to look at gender diversity issues in the U.S. patent system. Elsewhere in D.C., the Cato Institute will look at Medicare drug pricing issues, a topic which has increasingly included discussion of patents, and the American Enterprise Institute will consider consumer data privacy issues in a two-hour event featuring officials from the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice.

On the morning of Thursday, March 7, the House Ways & Means Committee’s Subcommittee on Health held a hearing titled Promoting Competition to Lower Medicare Drug Prices. The hearing focused a great deal on the effect of patents in the pharmaceutical industry as they relate to pricing. Although some of the Republican membership of the subcommittee pointed out issues with various proposals to limit patent protections for drugmakers, the panel acted largely as a firing squad for patents. In his closing statement, Rep. Doggett expressed his dissatisfaction with the tenor of the day’s debate. “I view it as encouraging that there is bipartisan recognition of the serious problems so many Americans are facing with, really, prescription price gouging,” he said. “The question is whether we’ll have any bipartisan agreement on doing anything about it.”

Once we go down a path of government price controls and compulsory licensing we will have foregone opportunities for other, more rational policy choices and will soon find ourselves in a race to the bottom. Of course, making prescription drugs more affordable must be an important, shared goal. But the solutions we pursue cannot risk choking off America’s innovative ecosystem that leads the world in discovering new cures and treatments. As Nobel laureate and NIH Director Harold Varmus said in 1995, one must first have a new drug to price before one can worry about how to price it.  Letting our federal government import foreign price controls and expropriate patents is not the way to go about it.

This week in Capitol Hill hearings, it will be a relatively light week all around, and particularly so for those who focus on intellectual property, technology and innovation. Indeed, there are few hearings on tap for the week that might be of interest. Nevertheless, financial services innovation, health care cost reductions will be discussed in the Senate on Tuesday.

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.