When it comes to big drug pricing policies, are we thinking big enough?
What if our country’s drug policies are prioritizing the wrong things? And no, I don’t mean prioritizing middleman profits over patient savings, or prioritizing a higher cost biologic over a biosimilar. Think much bigger: What if we are investing far too much in breakthrough research, and not enough in persistent and growing problems like poverty and suicide?
That was the theme of a whirlwind talk at last week’s STAT Summitt from Peter Bach, the Sloan Kettering researcher who has made a name for himself by systematically, and sometimes scathingly, critiquing the U.S. drug pricing system.
Since hearing the talk, Bach’s final words have stuck with me: “Are we sure even that the right intervention is more drugs for rare diseases rather than more money back in poor people’s pockets?” That sounded more like a line from Andrew Yang’s presidential campaign than something being pushed by an M.D. with Bach’s credentials, so naturally, I asked him about it.
“When we talk about new drugs we often talk about drugs that improve quality of life but don’t increase longevity, or we talk about drugs that increase longevity on the order of months, maybe years,” Bach explained. “If you’re talking about a quarter of a state’s population having ten years less of life expectancy, you’re not going to be able to develop enough rare disease drugs to make up for that”
Read more about Bach’s newest idea here.
That was the theme of a whirlwind talk at last week’s STAT Summitt from Peter Bach, the Sloan Kettering researcher who has made a name for himself by systematically, and sometimes scathingly, critiquing the U.S. drug pricing system.
Since hearing the talk, Bach’s final words have stuck with me: “Are we sure even that the right intervention is more drugs for rare diseases rather than more money back in poor people’s pockets?” That sounded more like a line from Andrew Yang’s presidential campaign than something being pushed by an M.D. with Bach’s credentials, so naturally, I asked him about it.
“When we talk about new drugs we often talk about drugs that improve quality of life but don’t increase longevity, or we talk about drugs that increase longevity on the order of months, maybe years,” Bach explained. “If you’re talking about a quarter of a state’s population having ten years less of life expectancy, you’re not going to be able to develop enough rare disease drugs to make up for that”
Read more about Bach’s newest idea here.
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