Pharma hates the Senate drug pricing bill but it could be worse

The Senate Finance Committee’s long-awaited drug pricing bill saw daylight yesterday, and it comes with a cap on price hikes, a ceiling on out-of-pocket costs, and a dramatic reformation of how Medicare pays for drugs.

As STAT’s Lev Facher and Nicholas Florko report, that’s all anathemic to PhRMA, which said the bill would “siphon more than $150 billion from researching and developing new medicines.

But Umer Raffat, an analyst at EvercoreISI, ran some numbers and found that for treatments that cost less than $17,000 a year — which includes the biggest diabetes drugs — the industry would actually come out ahead with the proposed changes to Medicare. However the opposite would be true for many oral cancer drugs, which generally cost more than $100,000 a year, leaving drug makers in the hole.

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