By Angela Maas
Many innovative new therapies are coming onto the market, but
they also are launching with increasingly higher price tags, even as lawmakers
and regulators launch a flurry of activity aimed at bringing down drug prices.
Some industry experts caution that a few of the bills, if passed, could
endanger the research and development efforts around these novel drugs, while
others question that hypothesis.
One of the proposals is the International Pricing Index, an
effort by HHS to bring payments for Medicare Part B closer to what 16 other
"developed economies" pay for these drugs. The Senate's Prescription
Drug Pricing Reduction Act of 2019 proposes multiple changes to Medicare Part B
and Part D, as well as Medicaid. And the House’s Lower Drug Costs Now Act
proposes, among other things, requiring HHS to negotiate the prices of up to
250 drugs in Medicare without competitors. Companies not coming to an agreement
would be subject to financial penalties.
Drugmakers have vociferously pushed back on many of the
proposals, with one of the arguments against them being that the efforts would
have a chilling effect on pharma R&D.
"Empirical evidence" exists to support the idea that
"lower spending on pharmaceuticals will lead to lower R&D spending and
lower yield of innovative drugs," says Elan Rubinstein, Pharm.D.,
principal at EB Rubinstein Associates. But "there isn't enough evidence
either way" to say whether "there aren't policies besides spending
that can impact innovation."
"Additional patent protections and favorable tax treatment
of R&D expenditures for drugs designated to treat 'orphan' indications
appear have resulted in a large push among manufacturers and investors to bring
those products to market," he notes.
According to Lisa Kennedy, Ph.D., chief economist and managing
principal at Innopiphany LLC, "the biopharmaceutical industry is
responsible for approximately 70% of all innovation within health care. Price
fixing of pharmaceuticals has been shown in several studies to have a knock-on
effect on innovation."
She also asserts that oncology, one of the most productive and
exciting areas of innovation in the biopharmaceutical industry, could be hit
particularly hard.
From
RADAR on Specialty Pharmacy
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