Drug Pricing

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s effort to rein in mass-market copies of blockbuster GLP-1 drugs just survived a major legal challenge. Last month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit upheld the agency’s determination that the shortage of semaglutide—the active ingredient in Ozempic and Wegovy—is over. In ...

Billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban has picked another fight with pharmacy benefit managers, the powerful middlemen insurers hire to manage prescription drug benefits. His complaint is straightforward. The PBM-controlled system makes prescription drugs more expensive than they need to be, even for people with insurance. At a Texas State House hearing ...

President Trump just announced another round of agreements with pharmaceutical companies under his “most-favored-nation” drug pricing initiative. The nine new deals bring the total number of participating manufacturers to 26, covering nearly 90% of the branded-drug market. The campaign targets a real problem. Many wealthy countries use price controls to ...

Federal regulators are turning up the heat on sellers of copycat weight-loss drugs. Earlier this summer, the Food and Drug Administration sent warning letters to dozens of companies marketing compounded GLP-1s over misleading advertising. That action is more than welcome. The growing trade in compounded GLP-1s continues to expose patients ...

Four years ago, on August 16, President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act into law. Lawmakers promised that letting Medicare set drug prices would save taxpayers more than $100 billion over a decade. New research suggests the IRA may accomplish the opposite in the long run. A study by University ...

Some of the biggest advances in medicine don’t come from discovering entirely new drugs. They come from making existing ones easier to take, faster to administer, safer, and more effective. A new proposal from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services could make those improvements far less common. The agency ...

The Trump administration says it wants to accelerate medical innovation. Yet one new proposal from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services could do just the opposite. The agency has proposed a seemingly technical expansion of Medicare’s prescription drug price control scheme, which was created by the Inflation Reduction Act ...

Medicare spends billions of dollars each year treating heart disease, diabetes, kidney disease, cancer and other illnesses caused or worsened by obesity. Yet for decades, federal law has barred the program from covering medicines prescribed to treat obesity itself. In other words, Medicare has been willing to pay for the ...

If you’ve spent any time on social media lately, you’ve probably seen the ads. Lose weight fast. Get access to GLP-1s. Skip the doctor’s office. Delivered right to your door. For millions of Americans looking to lose weight, the promise is understandably appealing. These remarkable drugs, which include Ozempic, Wegovy, ...