Happy New Year! Drugs are more expensive now

Come Jan. 1, roughly two-thirds of the world’s most expensive medicines are going to cost more than they did the day before.

That’s according to Bernstein analyst Ronny Gal, who has been surveying payers and expects prices to rise between 7 percent and 9 percent.

Start-of-the-year price hikes are business as usual for pharma, but 2019’s incarnation comes after a contentious year for the industry. Pharma treaded lightly when it came to pricing in 2018, when intensifying rhetoric from the Trump administration led many companies to forgo scheduled increases.

Now the industry is making up for lost time, according to Gal, who points out that “the breadth of the [2019] increases is about 20 percent higher than previous years.”

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