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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...

January 21, 2016 Price and Costs

Like your iPhone? Federal officials designed it. Couldn't live without the Internet? Thank Uncle Sam — he invented it. Sick and need new medicine? Don't worry — the government is here to help. This fantastical line of thinking — that because the government funded basic, early-stage research, it can claim credit for a final product decades later — underpins the latest calls for more federal control of drug prices. Such calls are grossly ill-informed and demonstrate a deep misunderstanding of the drug...