Drug Price Policy: New Transparency Bill Would Require Drug Companies To Report Costs For High Cost Drugs; Will Annuities Be The Future Payment Model For Expensive Medicine?

An interesting claim against the pharmaceutical industry (though usually made by only industry's most hardened critics) is that companies don’t want to find a cure—they’d prefer lifelong patients. Recently, Gilead Sciences indeed found a cure for hepatitis C--one that both gets rid of the hepatitis C virus in a patient’s body and does so without many of the terrible side effects that plagued previous therapies. Rather than embracing the medical breakthrough, however, many articles focused on the $84,000 price tag for the full round of treatment. Few mentioned the long-term cost savings now that newly cured patients could lead productive lives without frequent, expensive hospital visits, or would avoid a liver transplant down the road, which might cost a quarter of a million dollars. California Bill: "Pharmaceutical Cost Transparency Act of 2015" Highlighting the focus on cost, California lawmakers have just introduced a bill that would require each manufacturer of a prescription drug that costs "$10,000 or more annually or per course of treatment" to file a yearly report outlining the costs for every such drug.  The report would have to include the following costs paid by the manufacturer and, separately, the costs paid by "any predecessor in the development of the drug":  Total costs for the production of the drug, including the total R&D costs Total costs of clinical trials and other regulatory costs Total costs for materials, manufacturing, and ...
Source: Policy and Medicine - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs