8/13/21 Biden Takes Aim at the High Price of Prescription Drugs

"Prescription drug prices are outrageously expensive in America," President Joe Biden said on Thursday. Noting that 1 in 4 families have trouble paying for their medications, he added, "These prices have put the squeeze on too many families and stripped them of their dignity."

Biden has just made lowering those prices the next priority for his administration, starting with allowing Medicare to negotiate prices for medicines that doctors prescribe frequently.

It's almost hard to believe that Medicare is forbidden by law to do so. It's routine in countries with national health systems. Medicaid can't negotiate prices either. Americans spend $1,162 per capita each year for prescriptions, whereas Canadians pay $807 and Britons $497. But Big Pharma has been generous with its dollars in the halls of Congress for many years.

Some of the ways that Big Pharma has kept prices high include:

—-Marketing a drug to adults, and then just before the patent expires, getting it approved for kids, so the patent starts afresh.

—-Marketing a drug, then, just before the patent expires, adding one ingredient, creating an “improved” version that gets a new patent.

--- Producing small-market or "orphan" drugs, which give the makers a de facto monopoly for rare diseases

---Trying to minimize the number of generics of out-of-patent drugs. If there's a single generic, for instance, the price stays high. Big Pharma has even paid generic drug makers to hold off on drug development.

Insurers' drug formularies can involve plenty of shenanigans. Formularies are lists of drugs that insurers will cover. Sometimes a drug price will be lowered, but the benefit manager and the drug company split the savings, so that the patients' costs don't drop.

One of Big Pharma's readiest excuses for high prices is the cost of researching and developing the drugs, but the companies spend much more on sales and marketing than on R&D, and what's more, some R&D costs are borne by the National Institutes of Health and other public research institutions.

Since the medical field is so exceptionally complicated, we can't begin to do the topic justice.

Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon has been working on a drug-price plan for months, although the plan hasn't been disclosed. Aside from that, the way forward is yet to be mapped.

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Have you heard about any specific drug that’s particularly overpriced? Do you know people who are harmed by the high cost of prescription drugs? Will Biden be able to fix this problem?

Some of our examples come from the Commonwealth Fund: https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/other-publication/2017/oct/why-are-us-prescription-drug-prices-so-high

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/567616-biden-calls-on-congress-to-act-on-outrageously-high-drug-prices?rl=1

Image: "Health" by 401(K) 2013 is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0