The opioid bill isn't going to bail out Big Pharma

Since February, when Congress demanded that drug companies pay more for drugs used by Medicare patients, the pharma lobby has been itching for a way to revert things back to how they were. But the latest idea, attaching a fix to the bipartisanly popular opioid bill, is going nowhere.

As STAT's Nicholas Florko and Lev Facher report, the latest version of that bill will not contain a provision that relieves pharma of that responsibility. And it won't contain any vestiges of a separate bill meant to speed up the approval of generics, which had been floated as a bargaining chip to convince Democrats to give pharma a hand.

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