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Bernie Sanders has been registering his outrage about the price of insulin, and the presidential candidate thinks government-run health care is the solution to high drug costs. But almost no one noticed last week a Trump Administration move that could make the diabetes treatment more affordable for more Americans. In any event the insulin story is more about perverse incentives than corporate greed. The Trump Administration put out an IRS guidance last week for high-deductible health plans that are paired with a health-savings account. (7/22)

President Donald Trump came into office promising to do something about the inflated prices Americans pay for prescription drugs. He considered limiting rebates to the middlemen between insurance plans and drug companies but recently concluded that the complex plan was unworkable. This leaves policymakers back at square one. And it leaves Americans with a number of questions. Should they just resign themselves to paying more for their meds? Should they insist on price controls? Is there something in between? (7/18)

As the political wars rage, unsolved problems multiply, including issues of deep concern to the American people. Every survey places the cost of health care at or near the top of the list, and prescription drugs are where Americans most frequently experience these costs. Let’s look at one of the most common examples—diabetes—and ask a simple question: Why does insulin cost so much? The raw statistics are stunning. According to the most recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 23 million Americans have diagnosed diabetes, compared with only 1.6 million in 1958. (William A. Galston, 7/23)

It’s no secret that the cost of prescription drugs is too high for many Americans to afford. Across the country, patients are struggling to access medicines they desperately need. In fact, we are charged, on average, significantly more than residents of other high-income countries for the same prescription drugs. These high prices are due in no small part to the ability of pharmaceutical companies to protect sometimes decades-long monopolies on their products. It’s past time for patent reform. (Lyrissa Lidsky, 7/23)

Many of the prescription drugs Americans struggle to pay for don’t work very well, and if we were better informed, we might not consider them worth the risk of side effects. Buried among the mediocre drugs are a few that do add years of life or alleviate significant suffering. Clarifying which ones really are lifesavers – such as insulin, drugs for HIV and hepatitis C – would help get those drugs to the people who need them, and help spare everyone from unnecessary medication. Medical costs, especially drug costs, have rightly taken center stage in political debates as prices continue to rise and surveys indicate that cost deters many people from filling prescriptions. The problem has needlessly spread: The number of prescriptions being written has tripled in the last 15 years, but this has not been matched by a tripling of the number of miracle cures and magic bullets. (Faye Flam, 7/18)

Orange resident Wayne King had a simple enough question: How do prescription drugs get named? My initial guess was there must be some blue-ribbon panel of experts involved, or maybe a fancy computer algorithm. I couldn’t have been more wrong. King, 80, made clear that he wasn’t so interested in brand names, which drug companies typically struggle to concoct because, simply, all the good ones have been taken. (David Lazarus, 7/23)

Patients need help paying for their medicines at the pharmacy counter, and the pharmaceutical industry wants to be part of the solution, but undermining the patent system is the wrong approach. Patents are the lifeblood of the medicines patients rely on every day in America. Not only would weaker patent protections limit investment in new medicines and other important medical advances, they would also reduce competition by undermining the incentive to create new medicines to compete with existing medicines. (James Stansel, 7/18)

Politicians talk a lot about farming but seldom about “pharming,” even though the latter can also have a big impact on Americans’ pocketbooks—and their health. The punny name refers to genetically modifying plants such as corn, rice, tobacco and alfalfa to produce high concentrations of pharmaceutical ingredients. Many common medicines already come from plants, including morphine, the fiber supplement Metamucil and the cancer drug Taxol. Yet heavy-handed federal regulations have frozen out pharming efforts, making it far too difficult for researchers to use this approach to create new medications.An article this month in the journal Nature highlights pharming’s enormous promise. (Kathleen L. Hefferon and Henry I. Miller, 7/18)

Americans assume their generic drugs are safe, effective and cheaper versions of name brand drugs. The problem is that the assumption is right, until it is wrong. Reports from mainstream news outlets such as NBC News have found that drugs manufactured in overseas locations such as China and destined for American consumers have been tainted, sometimes with chemicals that cause cancer. While several former Food and Drug Administration (FDA) inspectors have attempted to sound the alarm, warning consumers that generic drugs manufactured in China and India may be less than pure, the system set up to police these overseas manufacturers continues to fail. (Former Rep. George Nethercutt, 7/22)

President Trump has said he plans to issue an executive order to lower what the United States government would pay for drugs to no more than “whatever the lowest nation’s price is.” The proposal is designed to end what he has called “global freeloading,” whereby Americans pay more for drugs than residents of other countries.The executive order announcement follows an earlier proposal by the Trump administration to decrease the price of physician-administered therapies by tying them to an international price index so their prices will not exceed those charged in other countries. (Edward Abrahams, 7/18)

Katherine Eban’s new book, “Bottle of Lies,” has focused a very intense spotlight on the mostly ignored transgressions of the Indian generic pharmaceutical industry in the processes they follow — or all too often don’t follow — to make quality products. This industry, which has rarely been subjected to such rigorous journalistic scrutiny, has lashed back at Eban, attacking her integrity and her work. The latest salvo comes from Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, who calls Eban’s exposé anecdotal, biased, unfair, and unbalanced, and accuses the author of playing up to the poor perceptions of the Indian pharmaceutical industry and the country. Shaw did this in a softball interview she gave to an Indian publication in which she is an investor. (Dinesh Thakur, 7/22)

Waste and inefficiency in drug development are big problems. They can be hard to spot, especially when you are in the midst of the process. A new way of visualizing clinical trials might help.Some experts believe that as much as 85% of biomedical research may be wasteful due to biases in study design, lack of publication, unnecessary duplication, or investigating questions of little importance. It is also estimated that only about one (or maybe two) of every 10 drugs that enter into clinical testing will turn out to be effective. (Spencer Phillips Hey, 7/18)