The Smart Way to Cut Prescription Drug Prices

"One of the great moral issues of our day,” Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) told a congressional hearing last week, “is that there are people in our country suffering and in some cases dying because they are not able to afford a medicine that can be produced for pennies per treatment.”

“The simple fact is that the prices of patent medicines are a significant barrier to access to health for millions of uninsured and underinsured Americans and people die because of it.”

The Vermont senator cited as just one example of overinflated pricing the cost to the U.S. of patients taking the effective HIV treatment Atripla. Marketed jointly by Gilead Sciences and Bristol-Myers Squibb, Atripla “costs roughly $25,000 a year for a single patient in the U.S.,” Zach Carter recently reported in the Huffington Post, whereas "in countries that allow generic drugs to compete with Atripla, treatment is just $200 a year.”

Sen. Sanders has introduced intelligent legislation to tackle the issue. If passed, writes Carter, it would "offer companies a big up-front prize for developing new, innovative AIDS drugs. In return for the big payday, pharmaceutical firms would agree to allow generic versions of their medicines to hit the market immediately. The fund would total $3 billion for its first year.”

“Moving from a patent system to an effective prize system, using the power of the competitive marketplace to ensure the efficient dissemination of medicines, is a critical step in creating [a] more efficient innovation system,” Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz said at Tuesday’s hearing.

We can only hope such legislation passes.

Further details here.

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