Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Perspectives: If U.S. Can Negotiate Over Aircraft Carriers, It Can Over Drugs, Too
Donald Trump has certainly gotten the pharmaceutical industry's attention with his ruminations about drug prices. Within 20 minutes of last Wednesday's news conference, in which the president-elect called for the government to negotiate directly with pharmaceutical companies, the industry shed roughly $25 billion in stock value. (1/16)
The drug prices are too damn high, but having government 鈥渘egotiate鈥 lower prices is a distraction from reforms that would actually work. To make drugs more affordable, we need not one tough-talking negotiator but 300 million of them. Congress can raise and equip that army by returning to the people the $3 trillion of health care spending that government and employers control, and by eliminating government-imposed barriers to affordable medicine. (Michael F. Cannon, 1/16)
The day after Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential election, pharma and biotech investors seemed to decide his administration would be one in which scrutiny of drug pricing would vanish and profits would soar. Shares in the Nasdaq Biotech Index (NBI) surged more on November 9 than they had in more than eight years.This dream was a fiction. (Max Nissen, 1/11)
President-elect Donald Trump鈥檚 book 鈥淭he Art of the Deal鈥 details using leverage in business negotiations to contain costs and deliver the goods. Whether Trump wrote his聽greed-is-good 鈥80s-era bestseller or not, the book offers a selective glimpse into Trump鈥檚 political style. His wheeling-and-dealing background came out again this week when he lashed out at Big Pharma at his Wednesday press conference, accusing the industry聽of price-gouging the public and promising a new art to that deal. (Angelo Young, 1/14)
President-elect Donald Trump sent biopharma stocks into a tailspin Wednesday after asserting that pharma is "getting away with murder" on drug prices during a closely-watched press conference. But Trump's suggestions for keeping these high prices in check through a bidding process for Medicare could re-invigorate the nastiest political debates about "care rationing" that surrounded the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. (Sy Mukherjee, 1/13)
Trump didn鈥檛 say a whole lot in his press conference on Wednesday, but his remark that America needed to revise its process for buying pharmaceuticals made some enormous waves. 鈥淭hey鈥檙e getting away with murder,鈥 he said. Big Pharma lost almost $25 billion in market value in just 20 minutes. From the size of the market鈥檚 reaction, you would assume that pharma must really be getting away with murder. (Megan McArdle, 1/13)
Merck & Co Inc. and its immune-boosting cancer drug Keytruda keep putting out market stunners.聽聽A clinical trial failure by Bristol-Myers Sqibb Co. in August gave Merck a big head start in treating lung cancer, leaving Keytruda as the only drug of its type available聽to newly diagnosed patients. And on Monday, Merck announced the FDA had accepted its application to combine Keytruda with chemotherapy to treat a much wider group of patients than it currently does. (Max Nissen, 1/12)
