After Trying Nearly Everything Else To Protect Drug Profits, Pharma Tries Actually Cutting Prices

Bloomberg: Drugmakers Try A Rare Tactic To Boost Sales: Cutting The Price
Drugmakers tried just about every move under the sun to nurture sales of its products -- pharmacy coupons for patients, exclusive deals with insurers, even selling a medicine’s patent to a Native American tribe to shield it from a legal challenge. What’s far rarer is the step two drugmakers announced Saturday: a price cut. Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc. and Sanofi said they would deeply discount their $14,000-a-year cholesterol treatment to $4,500 to $8,000 for some patients in order to loosen insurer restriction on the drugs, which so far have sold poorly. (Spalding and Cortez, 3/12)

CNBC: Martin Shkreli's Legacy: Shaping The Drug Pricing Debate
Martin Shkreli gained a number of monikers in his rise to infamy. Pharma Bro. Most hated man in America. Face of corporate greed. Executives in the drug industry call him something else: catalyst. "He was, in the great scheme of things, a drop in the bucket," said Ron Cohen, CEO of biotech company Acorda Therapeutics and past chair of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization industry group. "But he created such a massive impression and blowback that it forced entire industries, government, patient advocacy groups, the media and political entities all to focus on these issues in a way that I don't know that they would have absent that event." (Tirrell, 3/9)

The Hill: FDA Chief Becomes Point Man On Drug Prices
Scott Gottlieb, head of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), has emerged as a key figure in the Trump administration’s push to lower the cost of prescription drugs. Gottlieb has moved to the front lines of the drug pricing fight, criticizing brand-name drug manufacturers he says are trying to block competition from getting to market. (Weixel, 3/14)

Stat: Henry Waxman Says Lawmakers 'Derelict' If They Don't Address Drug Prices
Henry Waxman is a household name in pharmaceutical circles — during his three decades on Capitol Hill, he helped write the Affordable Care Act and expand Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program. He sponsored the 1984 Hatch-Waxman Act, which set up the modern infrastructure for bringing generic drugs to market, and chaired the Energy and Commerce Committee, which has jurisdiction over health-related issues, from 2009 to 2011. Since his retirement from Congress in 2015, Waxman has served as chairman of Waxman Strategies, a lobbying firm that has been active on health issues, especially the 340B drug discount program. (Swetlitz, 3/14)

Axios: The First Target On Drug Prices: Pharmacy Benefit Managers
After months of circular finger-pointing over high drug prices, lawmakers, administration officials and parts of the health care industry seem to have settled on an initial target: pharmacy benefit managers, the middlemen that health insurers and employers hire to negotiate with drug companies. Yes, but: There are savings to be wrung out of the highly concentrated PBM industry. That's why insurers are so eager to operate their own PBMs. But analysts say squeezing PBMs won't solve some of the fundamental problems that drive high drug spending. (Herman, 3/12)

Forbes: In The War Against High Drug Prices, Some Patients Are Collateral Damage
Tommy Mann's dad had his first heart attack when he was 29. That's how he found out that he had a genetic disorder, familial hypercholesterolemia (FH), that causes very high cholesterol levels. Tommy and his two sisters have FH, too. Even on the top dose of cholesterol pills, Tommy Mann's low-density lipoprotein, or LDL, is 170 milligrams per deciliter – worse numbers than most people with high cholesterol have before they start medicine.Mann, a 37-year-old lawyer, found an injection, called a PCSK9 inhibitor, that could lower his LDL to just 50 mg/dL. The problem: His insurer, United Healthcare, has been denying his requests for it for more than two years. PCSK9 inhibitors cost $14,000 a year, triple what older cholesterol drugs cost before they went generic, and have become a front line in the war over drug prices. And so Mann's pleas – that his father died after a heart transplant, that his sister had a heart attack, that he has small children – fell on deaf ears. (Herper, 3/12)

Stat: A Costly PBM Trick: Set Lower Copays For Branded Drugs Than For Generics
PBMs use their size to negotiate drug prices with manufacturers, passing on a certain percentage of any rebates downstream to the insurance company and keeping rest of the spread for themselves. What makes this murky is that the deals these companies strike with drug makers are kept secret, so no one besides the PBM knows how much of the rebate is actually passed on to consumers. In some cases, they keep more than what they pay the maker for the drug. Since pharmacy benefit managers profit on the spread, they have no real inventive to push pharmaceutical companies to reduce costs since their profits increase with the list price. (Haider Warraich, 3/12)

Politico Pro: Politico-Harvard Poll: Americans Worry That Government Action On Drug Prices Could Backfire
A new POLITICO-Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health poll finds that Republicans and Democrats alike overwhelmingly support the idea of drastic government action on drug prices — with 9 out of 10 in favor of handing Medicare the power to negotiate directly with pharmaceutical manufacturers. But that bipartisan enthusiasm falters when Americans are confronted with the negative trade-offs tied to forcing prices lower, a finding that helps explain why lawmakers may have an easier time railing against skyrocketing drug prices than actually doing anything about them. (Cancryn, 3/12)

Stat: Feds Outline When They Will Pursue Drug Makers For Off-Label Marketing
Despite impressions to the contrary, federal officials plan to pursue drug makers for illegal marketing, according to one Department of Justice official who recently provided a roadmap for those seeking to identify bad behavior. At issue is off-label marketing, a contentious topic that has resulted in huge fines paid by numerous drug makers over the years and is now at the center of a free speech struggle between the pharmaceutical industry and the Food and Drug Administration. (Silverman, 3/13)

Kaiser Health News: Patients Overpay For Prescriptions 23% Of The Time, Analysis Shows
As a health economist, Karen Van Nuys had heard that it’s sometimes cheaper to pay cash at the pharmacy counter than to put down your insurance card and pay a copay. So one day, she asked her pharmacist how much her prescription would cost if she didn’t use her health coverage and paid cash. “And sure enough, it was [several dollars] below my copay,” Van Nuys said. (Lupkin, 3/13)

Stat: U.S. Per Capita Drug Spending Will Decline Slightly This Year Thanks To Moderating Price Hikes 
The amount of money spent on medicines by each American this year will decline slightly to $800 per person and spending will continue at this level through 2022, thanks to moderating price hikes and the loss of patent protection on many drugs, a new report forecasts. Moreover, 2018 will mark the third consecutive year in which U.S. per capita spending on pharmaceuticals will fall, reflecting discounts and rebates extracted from drug makers and overall slowing spending growth, according to the IQVIA Institute for Human Data Science. Overall, spending will rise 4 percent to 7 percent through 2022 on a compounded annual growth rate. (Silverman, 3/13)

Bloomberg: Allergan CEO Brent Saunders Got $32.8 Million Pay Package For 2017 
Allergan Plc Chief Executive Officer Brent Saunders received $32.8 million of compensation for 2017, a year when shares of the drugmaker slumped. Saunders was awarded $22.7 million of restricted stock, a biennial grant, about three-quarters of which will vest only if the company meets goals for shareholder return as well as research and development milestones, according to a regulatory filing Tuesday. (Melin, 3/13)

Stat: GOP Trying To Relax Law That Would Put Drug Makers On The Hook For More Costs
Republicans in Congress are working to relax a law that would force drug makers to pay a higher percentage of costs for Medicare beneficiaries. Democratic aides, including in House leadership, and a spate of health industry lobbyists confirmed that House Republicans are trying to use an upcoming spending bill to make the change at the behest of the pharmaceutical industry, which has spent the weeks since the law was enacted in February blasting the policy. Whether the industry can agree to the particulars of a “fix” before a March 23 deadline and whether Democrats will accept the policy is still up in the air. (Mershon, 3/8)

Bloomberg: Big Health-Care Players Are Turning Their Partners Into Prey 
Over 20 years, Brian Komoto built a thriving pharmacy in California’s Central Valley. Each day, his nurses would travel the vast agricultural region’s roads to help hepatitis C patients take a grueling regimen of shots. Then, in 2016, 20 percent of Komoto’s business vanished, practically overnight. The insurer Centene Corp. purchased the health plan that covered his patients -- many of them Hispanic farm workers who had developed a level of trust with Komoto’s traveling nurses. Centene had its own mail-order pharmacy, and it told the patients to go there instead, he said. (Langreth, 3/12)

Modern Healthcare: Cigna-Express Scripts Deal Unlikely To Benefit Consumers 
Cigna Corp. and Express Scripts' $67 billion merger takes a page from an old industry playbook that bigger is better, but experts are skeptical that it will fundamentally change an obscure sector of healthcare. Insurer Cigna said early March 8 that it is buying the nation's No. 1 pharmacy benefit manager Express Scripts for $52 billion in cash and will assume $15 billion in Express Scripts' debt. The companies' top executives said the deal would make healthcare simpler, more personalized, and better coordinated, while also driving higher quality and affordability for consumers by offering a broad spectrum of products under one roof. (Kacik and Livingston, 3/12)

Stat: Investors Are Pouring Money Into Consumer Genomics. Will It Pay Off?
Helix, the Silicon Valley company that’s styled itself as an app store for DNA tests, made a splash last week when it announced it had raised $200 million — the latest windfall for a company leveraging a boom in consumer genomics. But as money sloshes around the industry, there’s an uneasy and unsettled question gnawing at even the most bullish investors: Are these bets going to pay off? (Robbins, 3/8)

Stat: From App Store To Drug Store, Digital Health Is Redefining Pharma’s Pipeline
Backed by a growing body of evidence, software is itself becoming a prescription for diseases ranging from depression to heart disease, and drug companies are starting to take notice. In the past couple years, many have quickly ramped up their investments in digital startups, infusing software-based therapies into pipelines once dominated by traditional medicines. These products, known broadly as digital therapeutics, deliver treatment to patients through video games, smartphone apps, and sensors buried in pills or attached to medication dispensers. (Ross, 3/13)

Stat: Millions In Fines Are Adding Up As Clinical Trial Information Goes Unreported 
The U.S. government could impose more than $11.2 million in fines on companies and universities for failing to report study results on ClinicalTrials.gov, but has so far failed to do so, according to a recently launched website. Consequently, the folks behind the new site, which is called Trials Tracker, want FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb to start levying the $10,000-a-day fines that are permitted under federal law and are adding up each day. Trial sponsors have 13 months from completing a study to posting summary result and side effect information, according to the FDA Amendments Act of 2007. (Silverman, 3/12)

Denver Post: Prescription Drug Prices Are Soaring. Will A Bill In The Colorado Legislature Help Consumers Save Money? 
Brandt [Wilkins] and other Coloradans could have more information about what prescription drugs cost under a bill that passed its first committee vote Thursday at the state Capitol. The bill seeks to peel back a layer of mystery surrounding rising drug prices, although critics say it won’t provide consumers with useful information. It passed the House Health, Insurance and Environment Committee on a party-line vote — Democrats in favor and Republicans opposed — meaning that its passage in the GOP-controlled Senate is less certain. (Ingold, 3/9)