President Donald Trump rescinded an executive order issued by former President Joe Biden aimed at finding new models for lowering drug costs. Trump's action didn't affect the caps on seniors' drug costs or Medicare price negotiations that Biden signed into law. But social media posts have...
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President Donald Trump rescinded an executive order issued by former President Joe Biden aimed at finding new models for lowering drug costs. Trump’s action didn’t affect the caps on seniors’ drug costs or Medicare price negotiations that Biden signed into law. But social media posts have wrongly claimed otherwise.
Is this what's being discussed?
With regards to rolling back Biden actions on this, there a few different ways to look at it, and it's messy because objecting to some of the provisions can come from both a place of prudence, or it can come people a place of nefarious "protect the donors" selfishness.
One idea was to create a list, referred to as the “$2 drug model,” which would give beneficiaries access to a set of low-cost generic drugs for common conditions at a flat copay of $2 available through Medicare Part B plans. “The idea was basically to encourage more utilization of these lower-cost medications,” Cubanski said.
A second model was “designed to facilitate greater access through Medicaid programs to expensive cell and gene therapies” through multistate purchasing agreements, Cubanski said. “They are right now really difficult to purchase on an individual need because of the expense of these medications.”
The third model was called the “accelerating clinical evidence model. It was engineered I think to encourage pharmaceutical companies who had had their drugs approved by the FDA … to move more quickly through the confirmatory clinical trials that are needed in order to get full approval from the FDA,” Cubanski explained. The accelerated approvals would make some drugs available to patients faster and at a lower price.
Speaking as someone who's not an elected official, and who doesn't receive a dime from (nor invest in any Pharma companies), I put the one in green that I thought was a really good idea, and the 2 in red that I have some potential concerns in (and that the concerns have nothing to do with profits)
That first item... whenever you hear of these "$X Drug plan" initiatives, those are often misleading and capitalizing on a certain level of public ignorance about pharmaceuticals.
People have been conditioned into thinking "generics are just as good as name brand" and "all generics are the same". That's actually not true.
Canada did a study on one particular class of drugs (blood pressure medication), and studied over 130,000 individuals taking those medications both 2 years before and 1 year after the generic was available and they switched to it.
As reported by Harvard who reviewed the study's findings:
They found that
A) The generic versions can have up to a 20% variation in the active ingredient (while that may not be a game changer for something like amoxicillin, that's certainly a problem for other common cardiovascular drugs, and especially mental health drugs)
B) The found that adverse reactions climbed up in comparison to when the patient had been on the name brand.
The researchers looked at the numbers of emergency room visits and hospitalizations for 136,177 individuals ages 66 and over (60% of them women) who used any of three blood pressure medications: losartan (U.S. brand name Cozaar), valsartan (Diovan), and candesartan (Atacand). They examined data for the periods 24 months before and 12 months after the generic versions of these medications went on the market.
In the month after each of the generics went into use, the rates of these adverse events went up: 10% for losartan, 12% for valsartan, and 14% for candesartan.
(it should also be noted that 10-15% of patients have to switch back to name brand after having problems - whether it be reactions - or failure of condition control -- that percentage even higher specifically among people on psychiatric medications where dosage is extremely critical)
So, these "$2 drug plan" approaches can be misleading... they can take a drug where the Official (®)
name brand costs $80, a mid-range generic costs $18, and a bottom shelf generic costs $4, and then simply negotiate the bottom shelf one from $4 down to $2, encourage people to take the bottom shelf one, and then pitch it as if they saved everyone $78 with their plan.
For the third one, I think it goes without saying that cutting corners and trying to rush approvals is going to be something that ultimately won't sit well with people of either political stripe. Folks on the left certainly aren't going to be hugely keen on "deregulate to make something cheaper", and if covid vaccines were any indicator, many on the right didn't respond well to the "take this pharmaceutical product that was quickly rolled out"
As far as the "nefarious selfish" objections I alluded to...well that one is pretty straight-forward, this can cut into profits, and for many politicians, phrama donors are a big part of who's buttering their bread so to speak.
