Drug Pricing

Next week, the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee will convene to hear testimony from the CEOs of Johnson & Johnson, Merck, and Bristol Myers Squibb on the prices of their drugs. The executives agreed to testify after the committee’s chair, Vermont socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., threatened to ...

The logic behind Florida’s new drug-importation program, which the U.S. Food and Drug Administration formally approved earlier this month, might seem straightforward. Since prescription drugs cost less in Canada, purchasing medicines in bulk from across our northern border should deliver significant savings. As Florida will soon discover, however, the devil is ...

It’s not every day that President Joe Biden and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis agree. But that’s exactly what happened this month, when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration green-lit Florida’s request to import certain prescription drugs from Canada, where they’re cheaper. “Canada has the same drugs. They’re like 25 cents on the ...

Drug shortages in the United States have reached crisis levels. The Food and Drug Administration reports that nearly 140 medicines are currently in short supply. That figure includes more than a dozen cancer drugs, which has forced doctors and patients to confront the dangerous possibility of rationing. These shortages threaten ...

In early December, the Biden administration announced a proposal on exercising march-in rights on taxpayer-funded drugs and other inventions that allows prices to “be a factor in considering whether a drug is accessible to the public.” This is a terrible idea. As the Congressional Research Service summarized, it is an ...

Patients, the ultimate healthcare arbiter, continue to bear the costs from the perverse incentives driving the pharmacy benefit manager (PBM) market. Because of these disincentives patients pay excessive out-of-pocket costs. Just as troubling, the misaligned incentives create impediments that dictate where patients can fill their prescriptions and which prescriptions they can ...

Republicans, meanwhile, are embracing the price controls that foreign countries impose on prescription drugs. Texas recently enacted a law seeking approval from the Biden administration to import cheaper prescription drugs from Canada, my native land. Texas now joins Republican-led Florida and New Hampshire in pressing for a way to import ...

But wait, the law’s proponents may say: The federal government hasn’t yet exercised its power to “negotiate” — or more accurately, cap — the prices of drugs in Medicare. Those price controls may save the federal government money. But patients won’t see much of the savings. The federal government has ...