Pharma Overhaul Would Reduce Drug Costs While Supporting Innovation

A recent article discusses the impact of legislation intended to lower drug prices on the pharmaceutical industry, such as price negotiation by Medicare and patent law reform. Although pharma continues to warn of a massive negative impact on innovation should such policies become enacted, the authors of the Harvard Business Review article disagree.

“Large pharmaceutical companies are nowhere near as important to real drug innovation as they purport to be. Furthermore, smart policy changes can sustain and increase the pace of life-changing breakthroughs in biomedicine through increased funding of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), cutting the costs and accelerating the speed of clinical trials, and reforming patent law to stop innovation-blocking abuses used by Big Pharma to prevent new drugs from entering the market.” Read more here.

(Source: David Blumenthal, Mark E. Miller, and Lovisa Gustafson, Harvard Business Review, 10/1/21)