Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Pharma Companies Have 60 Days To Lower Drug Prices In US, Trump Says
President Trump sent letters Thursday to 17 of the world’s largest drug companies, telling them to take more steps to slash the prices of prescription drugs to match the lowest price in certain foreign countries. The letters represent an escalation of the administration’s push for lower drug prices by launching a “most favored nation” model, which ties the prices of prescription medicines in the U.S. to the lowest found among comparably wealthy nations. (Weixel, 7/31)
The federal government has cracked open the door to what could be a transformation of the 340B Drug Pricing Program. The Health Resources and Services Administration is launching a voluntary program to test drugmakers paying rebates after purchase to safety-net providers that participate in 340B rather than discounting prices upfront, the agency announced Thursday. (Early, 7/31)
In other news on the Trump administration —
The Presidential Fitness Test is coming back. President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday afternoon reinstating the national fitness assessment implemented in public schools from 1956 until 2013. The role of administering the test will fall to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has been vocal in his concern about childhood obesity and whose “Make America Healthy Again” report in February attributed the issue, in part, to sedentary lifestyles. (Bendix and Haake, 7/31)
Numerous artificial intelligence (AI)-powered systems for diagnosing and monitoring Alzheimer's disease and other dementias are now authorized by the FDA, but how these systems were developed -- and therefore how they may or may not perform in important patient subgroups -- is difficult to see from the publicly available information, researchers found. Among 24 such systems (called devices in FDA parlance) authorized since 2015, FDA summaries for 14 lacked data on the participant sets used for training, and there was no information on validation sets for 22, according to Krista Y. Chen, MPH, of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, and colleagues. (Gever, 7/30)
