Drug Pricing | Boomers Daily

From a New England Journal of Medicine article:

Medicare negotiation of prescription-drug prices would bring U.S. government policies in line with those of other high-income countries, and the idea is popular with both the public and policy analysts. But it would represent a sea change for pharmaceutical firms, which will maintain that any threat to their pricing power will slow innovation.

Negotiating prices of 10 too-little drugs and 10 too-late drugs to levels currently paid in the United Kingdom would produce about $26.8 billion in savings in 2019 alone, most of which ($25.9 billion) would come from savings on drugs in the latter category. Over time, the drugs included could change. For instance, in 2020 this category might include Revlimid (lenalidomide), which generated $6.5 billion in 2018 U.S. sales; its price in the United Kingdom is 32% of that in the United States.

Americans all along the political spectrum favor allowing Medicare to negotiate the prices it pays for prescription drugs.¹ In September, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) introduced what is now called the Elijah E. Cummings Lower Drug Costs Now Act of 2019 (H.R. 3), and the bill would have Medicare do just that.

Although there are draft pieces of legislation and regulation that take aim at the rising cost of drugs, H.R. 3 is the legislative tip of the spear for price negotiation. If it became law, Medicare would target drugs that claim the largest share of the health care budget and that face limited competition from generics or biosimilars. I propose an alternative set of drugs for price negotiation: those that have too little evidence to support full approval or are too late in their life cycle to justify continued high prices.