Conference on Drug Pricing Injects New Statistics Into Debate, Few New Insights (Part 1 of 2)

The price of medications has become a leading social issue, distorting economies around the world and providing easy talking points to politicians of all parties (not that they know how to solve the problem). Last week I attended a conference on the topic at the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School. On one level, the increasing role that drugs play in health care is salutary. Wouldn’t you rather swallow a pill than go in for surgery, with the attendant risks of anesthesia, postoperative pain opiates, and exposure to the increasingly scary bacteria that lurk in hospitals? Wouldn’t you rather put up with a few (usually) minor side effects of medication than the protracted recovery and discomfort of invasive operations? And even when priced in the tens of thousands, drugs are usually cheaper than the therapies they replace. But drug costs are also deeply disrupting society. They are more and more dominant in the health care costs that take up nearly a fifth of the total output of the U.S., and the outsized demands that medications put on both private and public pocketbooks lead to drug pricing being a rare bipartisan issue. Michael Caljouw from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts pointed out at the conference that in Massachusetts, health care has skyrocketed from 20% to 45% of entire state budget in 20 years, and similar trends are found in other states. He says that an expensive new drug can “blow th...
Source: EMR and HIPAA - Category: Information Technology Authors: Tags: Healthcare Reform Medical Economics Personalized Medicine Precision Medicine Drug Pricing Healthcare Costs Medication Pricing Source Type: blogs