Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Perspectives On Drug Costs: Congress Must Say Enough Is Enough
San Jose Mercury News: Big Pharma A Health Hazard
The pharmaceutical industry has become a major health hazard to the American people. Our nation pays -- by far -- the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs. As a result, nearly one in five Americans cannot afford to fill their prescriptions. That is unacceptable. A lifesaving product does no good if patients cannot afford it .A new report from Americans for Tax Fairness explains how a pharmaceutical company, Gilead Sciences, games the system to charge high prices and then shifts the profits offshore to avoid billions in U.S. taxes. (Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., 8/15)
The Sacramento Bee: When A Flawed Remedy To Drug Prices Looks Better Than None At All
Flush from its triumphant gutting of a bill to impose even a modicum of transparency on drugmakers in California, the pharmaceutical industry last week cranked up the volume against a ballot initiative aimed at lowering the price of prescription drugs. “Proposition 61 is opposed by a broad coalition of more than 130 organizations,” read the dispatch, citing “bureaucratic hurdles” and other problems with the measure that would prohibit the state from paying more for drugs than the federal Department of Veterans Affairs does. For good measure, they added that one of the initiative’s backers is “controversial.” (8/12)
Stat: Laws To Expose Drug Pricing Strategies Probably Won't Work
From coast to coast, state lawmakers are pushing legislation in hopes of putting a lid on rising drug prices. More than a dozen bills have been proposed that require companies to either fork over information about their costs or explain recent price hikes for some medicines. ... Admirable as it is, this transparency movement is unlikely to make much, if any, difference. (Ed Silverman, 8/16)
Stat: 'Sunshine' Laws Were Meant To Protect Docs From Undue Influence
More than 100 state and national medical societies are trying to water down the Physician Payments Sunshine Act, a law that protects doctors and their patients from undue influence by pharmaceutical and medical device companies. ... But they can’t rewrite history in the process. Senator John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) recently introduced the Protect Continuing Physician Education and Patient Care Act. It would roll back the Sunshine Act requirement that drug and device companies report payments they’ve made to fund continuing medical education for doctors or to send them copies of research studies. (Paul D. Thacker, 8/10)
Bloomberg: Concordia Is On The Wrong Side Of Pharma History
Disappointing earnings. Substantially lower guidance for 2016. A CFO departure. A suspended dividend. A drug-pricing controversy. Oh, and a libel suit against a chicken farmer. All were features of Concordia International's unusually calamitous earnings report on Friday. For a day, at least, the Ontario-based specialty pharma firm one-upped its better-known progenitor Valeant, which has had a mixed week of its own. Concordia's most troubling resemblance to Valeant is that it, too, has become a poster child for major trends in pharma. First, the FDA is approving generics at a much faster rate than it has in the past, as it works through a backlog of applications, increasing competition for the older drugs on which Concordia relies. Secondly, U.S. payers are aggressively clamping down on pricey drugs, including some of Concordia's. (Max Nisen, 8/12)
Stat: Imprecise Research Threatens Precision Medicine
Precision medicine aims to be a transformative paradigm that moves away from the “one-size-fits-all” approach in which treatments work for some people but not others. To the average American, especially one who has cancer, precision medicine sets a high expectation of a more targeted, and so more effective, treatment. But all too often the science underpinning these targeted therapies has not been up to snuff and the result has been greater uncertainty about optimal treatment — just the opposite of what precision medicine intends to do. (Spencer Phillips Hey and Aaron S. Kesselheim, 8/11)
Philly.com: Pharma Plans Big Spending To Defend High Drug Prices
What happens when the volume of an industry's unit sales remains essentially flat for five years?In most cases that would create stagnant revenue and falling net profits as costs rise. Not so in pharma, an industry that relies on lobbyists to exempt it from the usual processes of economics such as market competition. Between 2010 and 2014, the number of prescriptions written for the 30 top-selling drugs rose by 20 percent, but the prices on those same products increased by an average 76 percent, the Wall Street Journal reported. That resulted in a revenue increase from those brands of 61 percent. The price increases amounted to more than eight times the rate of inflation. (Daniel R. Hoffman, 8/16)
