Drug Innovation
Drug Innovation
New PRI Brief Warns Trump Drug Price Control Policies Would Lead U.S. Down the Path to European-Style Socialism
SACRAMENTO – The Center for Medical Economics and Innovation at the Pacific Research Institute – a nonpartisan, California-based, free market think tank – today released a new issue brief warning that efforts by the Trump administration and some Republicans in Congress to embrace and expand the government price controls on ...
Sally Pipes and Wayne Winegarden
July 25, 2025
Blog
The U.S. Drug System Strikes a Reasonable Balance Between Incentivizing Innovation and Promoting Competition
The government explicitly grants innovators temporary market exclusivity to provide an opportunity for groundbreaking pharmaceutical companies to recover the costs of capital associated with developing novel treatments. This was one of the express purposes of past federal reform legislation, such as the Hatch-Waxman Act signed in 1984 and the Biologics ...
Wayne Winegarden
July 23, 2025
Commentary
Trump Must Shut Down Counterfeit Weight-Loss Drugs
Americans looking to lose weight are increasingly turning to the internet. And they’re being duped. Telehealth startups and fly-by-night pharmacies are peddling what look like cheap, convenient versions of blockbuster drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy. But many of these offerings are neither authentic nor safe. They’re “compounded” copies — knockoffs ...
Sally C. Pipes
July 22, 2025
Commentary
Private Efforts Not Public Committees Will Generate Healthcare Savings
Passed as part of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) was allocated $10 billion in 2011 for the first decade of its existence. It has been allocated hundreds of millions more since. The purpose of the program is to create payment models that ...
Wayne H Winegarden
July 21, 2025
Commentary
A Real and Present Threat to Alzheimer’s Patients
It’s a quintessential government outcome. A program intended to increase access to promising medical innovations is actually preventing Medicare beneficiaries from receiving FDA-approved treatments. Medicare’s “coverage with evidence development” (CED) was never authorized by Congress. Instead, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services created the program in 2005 by leveraging ...
Wayne H Winegarden
June 18, 2025
Blog
The 340B Discounts Hospitals Receive Will Often Exceed Total Drug Prices in Europe
Table 1: PBM Fees and Rebates Can Exceed International Prescription Medicine Prices by As Much As 900% I previously highlighted how estimated rebates and fees PBMs receive for 10 commonly used brand medicines far exceed the total prices of those medicines in eight OECD countries (see Table 1). For example, ...
Wayne Winegarden
June 16, 2025
Drug Importation
Listen to Sally Pipes on “Free the Economy” podcast
Listen to PRI President, CEO, and Thomas W. Smith Fellow in Health Care Policy Sally C. Pipes discuss her new book The World’s Medicine Chest (Encounter Books) on the Free the Economy podcast from the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Click here to listen
Pacific Research Institute
June 13, 2025
Blog
Read the latest on the push for drug price controls
To Improve Drug Affordability Congress Should Fix the Payment System
Demanding that drug prices in the U.S. equal overseas prices is akin to demanding that the price of all expensive handbags should equal the prices for the knockoffs that people purchase from street vendors. Of course knockoff bags are cheaper. They violate the intellectual property rights of the bag’s maker, ...
Wayne Winegarden
May 22, 2025
Drug Importation
Pipes: “Imposing tariffs on pharmaceutical products and ingredients would be a grave mistake”
Click here to download a copy of Pipes’ comments Thank you for inviting public input on the Department’s Section 232 examination of pharmaceutical imports and their relevance to U.S. national security interests. As president and CEO of the Pacific Research Institute and a longtime healthcare policy analyst, I’ve spent over ...
Sally C. Pipes
May 7, 2025
Commentary
Banning mRNA vaccines would stop emerging cancer treatments
Several states have effectively declared war on medical progress. Lawmakers in Iowa, Montana, Idaho, Texas and Kentucky introduced bills that would ban or restrict vaccines that use messenger RNA, or mRNA, technology — despite its immense potential for treating and even preventing some of the most vexing diseases known to ...
Sally C. Pipes
April 29, 2025
New PRI Brief Warns Trump Drug Price Control Policies Would Lead U.S. Down the Path to European-Style Socialism
SACRAMENTO – The Center for Medical Economics and Innovation at the Pacific Research Institute – a nonpartisan, California-based, free market think tank – today released a new issue brief warning that efforts by the Trump administration and some Republicans in Congress to embrace and expand the government price controls on ...
The U.S. Drug System Strikes a Reasonable Balance Between Incentivizing Innovation and Promoting Competition
The government explicitly grants innovators temporary market exclusivity to provide an opportunity for groundbreaking pharmaceutical companies to recover the costs of capital associated with developing novel treatments. This was one of the express purposes of past federal reform legislation, such as the Hatch-Waxman Act signed in 1984 and the Biologics ...
Trump Must Shut Down Counterfeit Weight-Loss Drugs
Americans looking to lose weight are increasingly turning to the internet. And they’re being duped. Telehealth startups and fly-by-night pharmacies are peddling what look like cheap, convenient versions of blockbuster drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy. But many of these offerings are neither authentic nor safe. They’re “compounded” copies — knockoffs ...
Private Efforts Not Public Committees Will Generate Healthcare Savings
Passed as part of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) was allocated $10 billion in 2011 for the first decade of its existence. It has been allocated hundreds of millions more since. The purpose of the program is to create payment models that ...
A Real and Present Threat to Alzheimer’s Patients
It’s a quintessential government outcome. A program intended to increase access to promising medical innovations is actually preventing Medicare beneficiaries from receiving FDA-approved treatments. Medicare’s “coverage with evidence development” (CED) was never authorized by Congress. Instead, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services created the program in 2005 by leveraging ...
The 340B Discounts Hospitals Receive Will Often Exceed Total Drug Prices in Europe
Table 1: PBM Fees and Rebates Can Exceed International Prescription Medicine Prices by As Much As 900% I previously highlighted how estimated rebates and fees PBMs receive for 10 commonly used brand medicines far exceed the total prices of those medicines in eight OECD countries (see Table 1). For example, ...
Listen to Sally Pipes on “Free the Economy” podcast
Listen to PRI President, CEO, and Thomas W. Smith Fellow in Health Care Policy Sally C. Pipes discuss her new book The World’s Medicine Chest (Encounter Books) on the Free the Economy podcast from the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Click here to listen
Read the latest on the push for drug price controls
To Improve Drug Affordability Congress Should Fix the Payment System
Demanding that drug prices in the U.S. equal overseas prices is akin to demanding that the price of all expensive handbags should equal the prices for the knockoffs that people purchase from street vendors. Of course knockoff bags are cheaper. They violate the intellectual property rights of the bag’s maker, ...
Pipes: “Imposing tariffs on pharmaceutical products and ingredients would be a grave mistake”
Click here to download a copy of Pipes’ comments Thank you for inviting public input on the Department’s Section 232 examination of pharmaceutical imports and their relevance to U.S. national security interests. As president and CEO of the Pacific Research Institute and a longtime healthcare policy analyst, I’ve spent over ...
Banning mRNA vaccines would stop emerging cancer treatments
Several states have effectively declared war on medical progress. Lawmakers in Iowa, Montana, Idaho, Texas and Kentucky introduced bills that would ban or restrict vaccines that use messenger RNA, or mRNA, technology — despite its immense potential for treating and even preventing some of the most vexing diseases known to ...