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Companies and officials are already preparing for negotiations over more drugs that could take a bigger bite out of high drug costs, and possibly their bottom lines. Next up are prices of 15 more drugs the government will identify by Feb 1. The two sides are also fighting over how the talks should work. Among the drug industry’s demands: clarity on how CMS determines the price of a drug. Drug companies are also fighting the agency’s potential changes for next year, including possibly cutting back the number of in-person meetings to fewer than three. (Hopkins, Loftus and Walker, 8/16)

The White House is touting just how much its new Medicare negotiation process cut drug prices. The problem is, the numbers it’s using don’t actually mean much. (Zhang, 8/15)

Drugmakers have said the process was not a legitimate negotiation, but all of them agreed to participate, and none pulled their drugs from the Medicare program. “The negotiations were comprehensive. They were intense. It took both sides to reach a good deal,” Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra said of the talks. Federal officials held three meetings with each participating drug company to discuss the offers and counteroffers and attempt to arrive at what officials said was a “mutually acceptable price” for the drug. (Weixel and Choi, 8/16)

President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, touting their efforts to lower prescription drug prices for Medicare recipients, hosted their first joint appearance since Biden ended his reelection bid, a policy event that quickly took on the tone and feel of a campaign rally. ... Turning to the reason for the event, Biden said he had been fighting since 1973, his first year in the Senate, to give Medicare the authority to negotiate drug prices. If Republicans regained the White House, he added, they would undo the progress his administration had made. “We finally beat Big Pharma,” he said. “And, might I add, with not one Republican vote in the entire Congress.” (Abutaleb and Wootson Jr., 8/15)

Last month, the Federal Trade Commission released a scathing report suggesting that pharmacy benefit managers, the middlemen in the drug supply chain known as PBMs, are “profiting by inflating drug costs and squeezing Main Street pharmacies. ”The FTC found that because of consolidation in the industry, the three largest PBMs now manage nearly 80% of all prescriptions filled in the United States. PBMs use that power, the agency concluded, to raise drug prices, control patients’ access to them, and steer people away from independent pharmacies and toward the pharmacies they own. (Chatlani, 8/15)

A recent court defeat for CVS Health Corp. is shining a light on how health-care corporations wield their financial might over doctors and pharmacies in ways that can put profits over patient care. With more than a dozen similar cases still pending in private arbitration, the pharmacy giant has millions of dollars on the line. (Tozzi, 8/15)