Finding a legislative middle ground on drug pricing

There’s still hope for bipartisan drug pricing policy, according to Sen. Bill Cassidy, who is rare among Republicans for having long embraced such reform. He’s in search of a balance of both conservative and liberal pricing ideas, since he figures both have merits and flaws.

For instance, Cassidy doesn’t agree with Democrats' argument, enshrined in their new bill, that cost savings could be beneficial enough to justify modest slowdowns in new drug development. “They are people whose parents have not died of Alzheimer’s, and they are people who never had significant cancer or have not had HIV,” Cassidy told STAT’s Lev Facher.

But he’s hardly an acolyte of President Trump’s proposed policy: “I don’t think importation is a solution,” Cassidy said.