When the U.S. Congress resumes next week, its top priority will be the passage of a massive budget bill that once again includes long-promised – or threatened, depending on a person’s perspective – provisions intended to bring down prescription drug prices.
Given the negative response to a proposed amendment allowing the price of NHS-dispensed drugs to be listed on labeling, the U.K.’s Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) has decided not to go forward with the policy, it announced Nov. 11.
It looks like direct Medicare drug price negotiations are back in the U.S. fiscal 2022 budget bill.
Nearly a week after President Joe Biden dropped drug pricing reforms from his Build Back Better budget framework, congressional Democrats came together on a scaled-back version of the pricing provisions originally included in H.R. 3.
In an effort to advance a fiscal 2022 spending package through a divided Congress, U.S. President Joe Biden released the framework for his Build Back Better agenda Oct. 28 – minus provisions that would allow Medicare to directly negotiate at least some prescription drug prices.
Sure H.R. 3 could save the U.S. government hundreds of billions of dollars on drug spending, but that savings comes at a long-term cost in innovation that’s higher than the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) initially forecast.
As more therapies are approved to treat severe atopic dermatitis, U.S. payers should make available at least one biologic and one JAK1 inhibitor, given how different the drug classes are in their onset of action and their risk profile, a panel of experts recommended at a recent Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER) roundtable.
Reiterating prescription drug pricing provisions included in an executive order issued in July, U.S. President Joe Biden provided a bit of context and a little more detail about what he has in mind during a brief Aug. 12 speech on how his “Build Back Better” agenda would lower drug prices. Part of that agenda is to allow Medicare to directly negotiate prescription drug prices. “The only thing Medicare is not allowed to negotiate are prices for prescription drugs. My plan gets rid of that prohibition,” Biden said, adding that Medicare negotiates every other health care cost.
Canada’s Federal Court of Appeal took the Patented Medicine Prices Review Board to task for ordering Alexion Pharmaceuticals Inc. to “forfeit excess revenues” generated by Soliris (eculizumab) between 2009 and 2017.
For the first time ever, Canada will be granting patent term adjustments beginning in January. That’s welcome news for the biopharmaceutical and med-tech industries, and it’s long overdue, Jeffrey Morton, a partner at Snell & Wilmer LLP, told BioWorld.
The M&As that are the current business model of the drug and device world are in for increased scrutiny under the executive order U.S. President Joe Biden signed July 9. Answering the administration’s call for a whole-of-government-approach to increasing competition in the U.S., the Department of Justice “will closely examine its antitrust guidelines and policy statements to better educate the public on its enforcement priorities, and it will heighten its efforts to prevent mergers that would result in excessive consolidations of purchasing power,” U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said.
