Free Republic

A pair of new companies are being launched to tackle high drug costs, the latest sign of employer frustration with the middlemen, known as PBMs, whose job it is to keep down the spending. The Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company PBC and the Purchaser Business Group on Health, a nonprofit coalition of nearly 40 large public and private employers, said they are each starting new pharmacy-benefit management companies. PBMs work on behalf of employers, labor unions and governments to decide which drugs are available to patients, negotiate rebates on the prices paid for those drugs and process payments to...

There are 58 million Americans who cannot afford the drugs they need, and 34 million adults know someone who died because they could not afford medications. Earlier this month, the House Ways & Means Committee endorsed H.R. 3, a proposal that would set prescription drug price controls as one way to pay for the massive $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill. While price controls may seem like an effective policy solution, they will result in drug shortages, a loss of future innovative treatments, and deny patients access to critical medicines for severe diseases. Data from the RAND Corporation shows the price of...

President Trump on Sunday signed an executive order moving Medicare one step closer to a "most favored nation" drug pricing system, instructing the government health care program for seniors to develop and test paying the same drug prices as other developed countries with cost controls. "It is the policy of the United States that the Medicare program should not pay more for costly Part B or Part D prescription drugs or biological products than the most-favored-nation price," Trump's order declares. The memo defines the most-favored-nation price as "the lowest price, after adjusting for volume and differences in national gross domestic...

One of Donald Trump's more memorable promises on the campaign trail was to lower the cost of prescription drugs. Polls show this issue remains popular with Americans, especially lower-income families, who are worried about high drug prices. Of course, the entire concept of drug prices' being "too high" is subjective. Drugs are too expensive ... compared with what? Certainly not compared with not having the drugs available at all. If you suffer from the intense pain of migraine headaches or have been diagnosed with lung cancer, how much would you pay for a drug to help you? I have friends...

Before entering public service at the federal level, I spent most of my life serving my community in a different way. As a pharmacist for more than 30 years, I saw firsthand the impact that prescription drug prices have on everyday citizens and families. As a result of research and development I have seen improvements in medications that save lives. Illnesses that were once a death sentence are now treatable with a prescription. While this is nothing short of a miracle, these advances are worthless if they are not affordable. I have seen elderly couples forced to choose between their...

Americans want health care to be less expensive. We also want our health care to be the most innovative in the world. The key to simultaneously achieving both of these goals is good public policy. Back in September, House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) introduced H.R. 3, also known as the Lower Drug Costs Now Act of 2019, into the House of Representatives with 105 co-sponsors, all Democrats. The House is set to vote on the bill this week. H.R. 3 would adopt international reference pricing for the Medicare program in an effort to lower drug costs....

Prices for prescription drugs edged down by 1% last year, a rare result driven by declines for generics and slow, low growth in the cost of brand-name medications, the government said Thursday. Though modest, it was the first such price drop in 45 years, according to nonpartisan economic experts at the federal Department of Health and Human Services, who deliver an annual report on the nation’s health care spending.

A former executive for Pfizer, recently tasked with joining HHS to help reduce the prices of Big Pharma’s monopoly prescription medications, was found bludgeoned to death outside his Washington D.C. apartment. Local police ruled the death of Daniel Best a suicide, raising immediate questions about how an individual can bludgeon himself to death with multiple blows. “The city’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner on Thursday said Best died from “multiple blunt force injuries” and it ruled his death a suicide. It would not release further information,” reports Cleveland.com. The news website also reports: In announcing his death, HHS Secretary...

The Rockford File is the story of how one very expensive prescription drug threatened to financially cripple an entire city. That city is Rockford, Illinois, an old industrial town outside of Chicago. Rather than using a health insurance company, Rockford has, for years, paid its own health care costs for its 1,000 employees and their dependents. When Rockford got hit with the drug bill it was so enormous the mayor at the time set out to understand why. Larry Morrissey: Everybody's asking the question, "Why is health care so expensive?" Because the fix is in. That's the answer. That's the...

How serious is President Trump about drug prices? Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings tells me that Trump has called him three times to follow up on their conversation at the White House earlier this month. And Trump's not just talking about letting Medicare negotiate drug prices, Cummings says. It's even worse for Republicans — because Trump is also talking about importing cheaper drugs from other countries. Why it matters: Trump has said many times he wants to do something about drug prices, and has terrified both the pharmaceutical industry and free-market Republicans with his talk of doing more price negotiations. They...

The Hidden Monopolies That Raise Drug Prices How pharmacy benefit managers morphed from processors to predators David Dayen March 28, 2017 Rob Frankil of Sellersville, Pennsylvania, followed his father into the family business after college. “My entire life,” he said, “I’ve been involved with managing and owning independent pharmacies.” He now owns two stores, a traditional community pharmacy and another that caters to long-term care facilities.Like any retail outlet, Frankil purchases inventory from a wholesale distributor and sells it to customers at a small markup. But unlike butchers or hardware store owners, pharmacists have no idea how much money they’ll...

E-mail Author Send to a Friend <% printurl = Request.ServerVariables("URL")%> Print Version June 22, 2004, 8:56 a.m. PharmaPez?Drug studies; are as fake as sugar pills. By Michael Fumento Americans have a love-hate relationship with pharmaceutical companies. We're delighted that they've done so much to increase the quality and lengths of our lives and that they consistently develop better products. We just wish the prices were a bit lower — perhaps on the order of Pez candy. Unfortunately some "citizens groups" exploit this ambiguity with self-published "studies" claiming drug companies exist only to gouge us — especially seniors. One such,...

In letter to Ranking Member Ryan, CBO highlights the latest health care broken promise . WASHINGTON – In response to a request from House Budget Committee Ranking Republican Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the Congressional Budget Office [CBO] confirmed that President Obama’s massive health care law will increase prescription drug prices. The CBO confirms the range of onerous restrictions and requirements will drive health care costs up, at odds with the claims made by its proponents. CBO’s letter specifies that manufacturers will have an incentive to raise drug prices and that, as a result, health care costs will increase for some...

“If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert,” Nobel economist Milton Friedman once quipped, “in five years there’d be a shortage of sand.” Friedman’s admonition is especially pertinent to the ongoing effort by Senate liberals to give federal bureaucrats a leading role in setting the price of drugs for seniors. Their track record on this front, not surprisingly, is appalling. Two years ago, Senate liberals, led by Sen. Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D.-Ill.), sought to head off implementation of the new federal drug entitlement for seniors (not a bad idea, given that it’s available to even...

100 Hours: Honest Leadership and Open Government John Samples, director of Cato's Center for Representative Government and author of The Fallacy Of Campaign Finance Reform: The ethics part of this agenda evokes a limited sense of déjà vu. On their first day in power in 1995, the House Republicans cut House staff, changed budgeting rules, enacted term limits for their leadership, banned proxy voting in committee, opened committee hearings to the public, required a three-fifths vote to increase taxes, started a comprehensive audit of the House, and applied anti-discrimination and workplace safety rules to Congress itself. Later they passed...

No one really likes it when a product increases at a price that's twice the rate of inflation. This quickly puts that product out of the reach of the average consumer. Predictably, the mourners will sing about how it is all unfair. This has been especially true in the case of health care costs. Health care costs in this nation are going up at double the rate of inflation and now cost $600 billion a year or a debilitating 11.5% of our gross national product. By comparison, Canada spends 8.5% of its gross national product on health care; Japan 6.7%...