Posted on 10/11/2021 9:15:44 AM PDT by Kaslin
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 prescription drugs in the United States increased by 76 percent between 2000 and 2017, well above the average inflation rate. This statistic is reflected in a recent report issued by the Department of Health and Human Services that revealed Americans pay more than $1,500 per person on prescription drugs, well above those in the United Kingdom, Canada, and the European Union.
A plethora of peer-reviewed studies reveal that price controls diminish profits and consequently affect future research and new drugs production. For example, quantitative analyses of EU price controls collected over 19 years showed that Europeans had access to 46 fewer drugs; if the same rules were imposed in the US, there would be 117 fewer new drugs. These regulations would eventually prevent patients from accessing future medications for treatable medical conditions in the long term.
Price controls will also make it more difficult for Americans to receive life-saving medications as early as possible. Research shows that mandating price cuts by 40 percent to 50 percent will reduce Research and Development by 30 percent to 60 percent for new drugs. Decreasing R&D funding reduces the availability of new drug products, and Americans may have to wait longer for new pharmaceutical drugs, which will have negative health impacts.
Britain's Institute of Cancer Research voiced concern that price-control medications delayed patients' access to life-saving cancer drugs. More specifically, in 2018, price controls in the UK have constrained cancer patients' access to innovative medications like Palbociclib and Ribociclib. These cancer drugs were authorized in 2017 for Americans, but British cancer patients could not access the drug until 2020. The Palbociclib and Ribociclib drugs have been shown to slow cancer progression by at least 10 months and postpone chemotherapy, allowing cancer patients to live longer and enjoy a better quality of life.
Price controls denying patient access to prescription drugs shows that the policy does not benefit patients and could leave them worse off. A smarter approach should not endanger consumer access to quality healthcare or medication availability. One such policy that would avoid these pitfalls is making it easier for generic drugs and biosimilars to enter the market.
A generic drug is a pharmaceutical product that is designed to be the same as a brand-name drug that has previously been approved by the FDA. Generic medicinal products must fulfill the same high standards of quality and production as brand-name drugs. They cost less to develop, and less to patients, since expensive clinical trials for safety and efficacy have already been completed.
According to recent Food and Drug Administration (FDA) data, when generic medicine manufacturers compete, generic drugs prices decline. Studies have shown that when brand name manufacturers face two to six generic competitors, the costs can fall by 95 percent. Improving access to generic drugs could save Americans $4 billion a year. Removing barriers to generic drugs will allow more people to obtain life-saving medications at a lower cost.
While price controls may seem an attractive policy, evidence shows it will have unintended consequences that will inflict significant damage on patients, both short-term and long-term. Rather than hampering the ability of pharmaceutical companies to develop critical medications and access drugs, Congress should prioritize making generic medications more readily available to consumers.
No they won’t. They will just remove the incentive for new drugs, because of the limited ability to pay for the research. It also gives a monopoly on established players.
Neither will 3rd party payers.
This is Jimmy Carter II on steroids. Carter was an honest incompetent boob unlike Biden, who is a corrupt boob. Also, the current crop of dishonest corrupt politicians on both sides will doom us to shortages and high prices.
For those of you who missed Carter, you are about to get a dose of a runaway Government.
No doubt. None.
It is "settled science" (their term, not mine which is why I use it here) that price controls cause shortages, plain and simple. Everywhere price controls have been tried, that is exactly what happens.
Availability goes down, and new development goes down.
From a Forbes article: "...Medicare Part B—our single-payer program for seniors’ visits to doctors’ offices—has a crazy way for paying for such drugs, called “ASP plus 6,” which stands for “average selling price plus 6 percent.” Doctors get a 6 percent commission—technically, now a 4.3 percent commission—on any drug they administer to a patient in their offices. When Congress designed this provision of the Medicare program, it effectively turned doctors into glorified real estate brokers. Just as a real estate broker is incentivized to sell you a bigger house so he can get a bigger commission, doctors are now incentivized to prescribe you the costliest medication, even if a more effective, lower-cost option is available.
According to Forbes, In 2018 President Trump proposed benchmarking Medicare’s reimbursement rates for physician-administered drugs to an International Pricing Index: the average price paid by a group of industrialized countries. It isn't a perfect solution, and the author of the Forbes piece at How Trump’s Prescription Drug Executive Orders Reduce Costs For Seniors & Taxpayers
That doesn’t mean the proposed International Pricing Index is perfect. As the author of the Forbes article noted in Forbes at the time, the index “leaves out the more market-oriented health care systems in Europe, and includes more single-payer oriented systems like Canada and the U.K.” The author went on to suggest that "...A market-based benchmark that focused on countries with private health insurance, instead of those with single-payer systems, would be more philosophically consistent with the Trump administration’s approach to health reform, while being just as effective at reducing Medicare drug costs..."
What that would do is make the price comparisons a more apples-to-apples type of thing, which would be more equitable from both the patient's perspective and the Drug Manufacturer's perspective, in my opinion.
If they pass this, and I have zero doubt they will indeed pass it, look for the availability of drugs to diminish and shortages to occur.
Damn these people. Damn them to Hell. And that isn't just an idle curse.
I just looked my online insurance statement. They list my insulin at ~$235 a vial, but I can go to Walmart and buy the equivalent insulin, made by the same company (Novo Nordisk) for $25.00 a vial.
There is something SERIOUSLY wrong with this picture.
From 2010 apparently:
“we estimated that price controls cost EU firms 46 fewer new medicines and 1680 fewer research jobs during our 19-year sample period”
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20617857/
How would one estimate such a thing?
Am I prepared to pay an extra $1000 a year in health insurance premiums to find drug cures for really rare conditions?
No.
It is far more important to me that I have access to 1987 level medical care (for which I paid $57.21/month in COBRA premiums) than 46 drugs useful to maybe 460,000 people get discovered.
The one good thing that Trump accomplished with the EO forcing Big Pharma to sell to Americans the price they sell to Canada and Europe was that Americans quit subsidizing the price for the world. I hope the liberals come to understand how they harmed America through the election of Joe Biden.
The French Revolution was, more than anything, about the price of bread. The king declared that the price of bread could be no higher than X. That’s the price of bread charged by the bakers. But the ingredients themselves were higher than the price of X. So, there was no bread to buy. But the bakers could make more exotic breads, called cake, and charge a price including X and profit. Then, the king declared that if the baker ran out of bread he had to sell cake at the same price as bread. Hence the alleged statement by Marie Antoinette, “If there is no bread, then let them eat cake.” It’s unlikely she said that as she would have been a child at the time.
But, the point is, if you set the price at X, you will run out of whatever is price controlled. This is why Canadians fly to the US for heart treatments as the price of simple heart medications is controlled. To make a profit, the Canadian pharmacists sell the drugs on the internet at a higher price, which is well below the price set in America. One reason the price is so high here is in order to get approval for the drug the company must sell certain allotments to other countries that have controlled prices. Many times this price is below cost. The extra amount is charged to US buyers.
Sigh.
If only.
I live in the bluest of blue states, and I hear people complaining all the time about gas prices, heating prices, grocery prices, and they talk about it as if it were a tropical depression forming in the Gulf of Mexico thousands of miles away that nobody, anywhere has control over.
I can only shake my head in astonishment. They don’t see that electing an administration that is devoted to destroying energy exploration, exploitation, and production would have any effect at all. A complete mystery.
Who can explain it?
It is very disheartening to me, and certainly lowers my estimation of the electorate, even in my corrupt state which was already damned low.
“Qu’ils mangent de la brioche”
“The phrase appears in book six of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions, whose first six books were written in 1765 and published in 1782.”
“Although published in 1782, Rousseau’s Confessions were finished thirteen years prior in 1769. Marie Antoinette, only fourteen years old at the time, would not arrive at Versailles from Austria until 1770. Since she was completely unknown to him at the time of writing, she could not have possibly been the ‘great princess’ he mentioned.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_them_eat_cake
“In the autumn of 1788, Necker introduced several emergency measures, banning all food exports and requiring all grain to be sold to official markets. Necker also organised the importation of foreign cereal and grain, totalling around 148,000 tonnes.”
“While these measures prevented a mass famine, they did not alleviate shortages. The availability of bread in Paris dwindled steadily through late 1788. By January 1789, the situation had become critical. In February 1789, city officials increased the price of bread from nine sous to 14.5 sous for a four-pound loaf.”
https://alphahistory.com/frenchrevolution/harvest-failures/
If it leads to more people dying they’ll probably pass it.
Everything the government touches costs more. Government has never made anything cheaper or better. The reason drugs, health care, and health insurance are all increasing in cost and declining in quality is due to government interference in the market.
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