Amid all the bills aimed at shining light into the black box of U.S. drug pricing and ending anticompetitive games, the House is planning on rolling out legislation in September that would directly impact the price of what could be hundreds of drugs by requiring Health and Human Services (HHS) to negotiate some prices.

The best way to score political points is to actually do something about U.S. prescription drug prices. That's the message members of the New Democrat Coalition Health Care Task Force delivered Wednesday to their party leadership in the House, as they requested another vote next week on a package of bipartisan drug pricing bills – this time minus the partisan provisions that Democrats knew would never fly in a Republican-controlled Senate.

Perhaps the hardest hit by the unintended consequences of well-intentioned legislation, U.S. insulin products continue to be the congressional poster child of all that's wrong with drug prices in America.

In the largest U.S. opioid-related settlement yet, Reckitt Benckiser Group plc agreed to pay a total of $1.4 billion to end federal civil and criminal investigations into its role in delaying generic competition to Suboxone, an opioid-addiction treatment drug.

Faced with a tradeoff between low Medicare premiums that benefit all beneficiaries and lower out-of-pocket costs that benefit the sickest beneficiaries, the Trump administration chose lower premiums, sinking a proposed rule that would have pulled drug rebates from the safe antikickback harbor.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit this week sidestepped some of the concerns raised by the biopharma industry, choosing instead to simply vacate and remand two Patent Trial and Appeal Board's (PTAB) decisions that invalidated patent claims involving the securing of communications over the Internet.

The striking of a Health and Human Services (HHS) rule requiring TV ads for prescription drugs to include list prices may turn up the temperature on the political roasting of biopharma companies – and stoke the pressure for Congress to do something about those prices.

With regulatory science always lagging innovation, ambiguity has long been a certainty at the FDA and is likely to become even more so as the pace of new technologies quickens.

The FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) issued 62% more warning letters under the first part of the Trump administration than it did during the last few years of the Obama administration. But the number of warnings for medical devices, food and tobacco products fell sharply under President Donald Trump, according to an investigative report being published in the July 5 issue of Science.

In the words of former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, the five-week government shutdown that ended Jan. 25 was "the most difficult operational challenge we have faced in modern times." While the full impact of that challenge could ripple through the FDA for a while, it made little difference in the number of warning letters the agency sent out between Dec. 23 and Jan. 25.