Author: Pacific Research Institute

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May 9, 2017 Price and Costs

Click here to read PRI's new issue brief, The Economic Costs of Pharmacy Benefit Managers Express Scripts, the largest pharmacy benefit manager (PBM) in the nation, is discovering just how much customer service matters. It may also be discovering that suing your biggest customer in court is generally not considered good customer service. Should Anthem Inc. withdraw its business from Express Scripts as it has indicated, then clearly the largest for-profit health insurance company will have made the determination that the value...

April 27, 2017 Price and Costs

The growing problem of health care affordability requires prompt and effective policy solutions. However, just as the wrong medical diagnosis will not cure a patient, and may make the patient even sicker, the wrong policy solution will not address the U.S. health care affordability problem, and may even worsen the problem. Proposals to import pharmaceuticals from overseas are the wrong policy solution. Nevertheless, both Hillary Clinton and President Trump advocated for drug importation on the campaign trail; and, Senator Bernie Sanders...

April 5, 2017 Value

One of the cornerstones of Great Britain’s National Health Service is an agency that approves and controls access to prescription drugs, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence. NICE recently announced a new policy that could delay and restrict access to new medicines for British citizens if the agency deems they don’t pass its “budget impact test.” A drug may be approved as safe and effective, but patients could still wait for years to get it if the agency...

March 7, 2017 Price and Costs

Imagine if you never had to directly pay for your morning cup of coffee again. Instead, a coffee insurer guaranteed that, for a small co-pay, you could enjoy a cup of coffee every morning. Sounds good? The catch, and there is always a catch, is the caveat “directly pay.” In this bizarre world, you would still be paying for your cup of coffee every morning, but instead of paying your favorite barista, you would now pay your local coffee insurer. But, bureaucracy loves...

March 2, 2017 Price and Costs

President Donald Trump is not the only politician saying he is going to work to get drug prices down. Oregon lawmakers are already patting themselves on the back for tackling drug prices. Rep. Mitch Greenlick (D-Portland) says the measure, Oregon House Bill 2387, could be a model for national reform. "If we can actually get it done," he recently explained, "it will show the country how to get those costs down." Let's hope he's wrong. The reform he's supporting is nothing...

February 24, 2017 Price and Costs

A recent oped in The Hill by MedShadow Foundation founder Suzanne Robotti claims that permitting Americans to import prescription drugs from Canada would save dollars and lives. It would do neither. Prescription drug importation has several notable proponents, like Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Amy Kobuchar (D-Minn.), and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), along with President Donald Trump. Without question, all of them sincerely want to make medicines more affordable. But importation wouldn't save patients much money. Instead, it would hamstring the Food and...

January 10, 2017 Price and Costs

Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar just introduced a federal budget amendment that would legalize the importation of foreign prescription drugs. This particular policy change has long topped Democrats' health care wish list, but shockingly, they might find support across the aisle this year, as President-elect Trump has spoken glowingly of importation. The bipartisan support doesn't make the proposal any better an idea. Legalizing importation would expose Americans to substandard foreign pills and undermine domestic drug innovation. Importation proponents say that American patients could...

January 5, 2017 Price and Costs

The imminent repeal of the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) is garnering most of the health care headlines, and rightly so. But, the focus on Obamacare should not overshadow other health care modifications that may be considered during the 115th Congress. Paramount among these proposals is the issue of drug importation. Currently, it is illegal to import drugs into the U.S. from other countries. It is rumored that several Senators will, in short order, attach amendments to the current budget resolution...

December 19, 2016 Innovation

The deaths of two patients at the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center in early 2015 were blamed in part on a drug-resistant superbug. Two years earlier, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention predicted that a “nightmare” was coming in the form of the killer bacteria carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae, also known as CRE. The bad dream was a grave reality for those patients who had gone to the hospital to merely undergo endoscopies and were likely infected by CRE from equipment...

November 14, 2016 Policy Proposals

While ostensibly designed to help, often the regulatory state only makes matters worse. Unfortunately, this maxim applies to the impact from regulations on new technologies that could help lessen the nation’s large and growing opioid abuse crisis. The total healthcare costs of prescription opioid abuse in 2007, which have likely increased since the crisis has continued to worsen, was estimated to be as high as $55.7 billion. These costs include higher health care expenses, reduced productivity at the workplace, and more spending...

August 2, 2016 Policy Proposals

FDA officials apparently think that doctors aren't smart enough to understand the labels on the medications they prescribe. The agency recently released draft guidance for how the pharmaceutical industry should label "biosimilars," a new class of medicines. These guidelines state that biosimilars' labels should leave out critical information in order to avoid causing "confusion" among doctors. Omitting this data could harm — or even kill — patients. The FDA should reverse course — and urge drug manufacturers to give doctors all the information...

July 15, 2016 Innovation

Between 2006 and 2015 the S&P 500 grew 7.25% per year on average–if you had invested $100 in the stock market in the beginning of 2006 it would be worth nearly $188 by the end of 2015. Sounds great. But, any investor during that period would surely feel less confident. After all, following the 36% decline in stock prices in 2008, a nervous investor might inaccurately conclude that the future is grim and that stock prices will never grow again. Alternatively, following the...

June 27, 2016 Price and Costs

California is losing the battle against opioid addiction. Every 45 minutes, someone in the Golden State overdoses. Fifty percent more people overdose today than in 2006. Fortunately, the Food and Drug Administration just approved the anti-addiction treatment Probuphine. It’s an implant placed in a person’s upper arm, where it releases a steady stream of an anti-addiction drug called buprenorphine to help addicts stay sober. Medical breakthroughs like this one could become rarer if a ballot measure under consideration in California is ratified...

June 22, 2016 Briefs, Innovation

Innovations in the pharmaceutical industry have significantly improved health outcomes for patients and have made important contributions to the U.S. economy. Provisions in the 21st Century Cures bill would help address these problems by accelerating the approval process for innovative pharmaceutical drugs and as a result, extend the effective patent lives for new pharmaceutical innovations....

June 6, 2016 Price and Costs

Imagine being denied treatment for cancer because Washington bureaucrats decided that a cutting-edge new therapy that could cure you just wasn’t “cost effective.” That’s already happening in Britain under its government-run health care system, the National Health Service. And Medicare officials are poised to bring similar policies here. The NHS’s “Cancer Drugs Fund” restricts physicians’ ability to prescribe half of all oncology medicines. If a medicine doesn’t extend the average cancer patient’s life span by a set length of time, which varies...