Big Pharma must address high drug prices

This past week, the pharmaceutical industry officially threw its toys out of the pram. After being correctly criticized for charging $89,000 for a drug available overseas for roughly $1500, the manufacturer simply pulled the drug from production.

There are numerous reasons why this particular price point for the drug in question – Emflaza – excited an angry reaction. The medicine is simply a repackaging of a steroid that’s been in use since the 1950s; its use to treat Duchenne muscular dystrophy is just one of many applications; it isn’t even sufficient as treatment on its own, but instead needs any number of other drugs to be prescribed with it in order to be helpful.

{mosads}In short, Emflaza is nothing but a trap to extort insurers, consumers, and even hospitals. The snare can only work because of America’s absurdly anticompetitive regulations on the drug market, including most especially the ban on importing drugs. Fortunately, there is a bipartisan consensus that this behavior shouldn’t continue, with everyone from Sens. Bernie Sanders to Chuck Grassley complaining about it.

Given these ideologically heterogeneous complaints, and the long list of scandals over similar absurdly priced drugs, a deeper question than just “what was pharma thinking” is required. Why doesn’t it understand that American consumers and their elected representatives have had enough? And given that fact, why don’t they adjust their business models?

The rise of populist outsiders like Bernie Sanders and now-President Trump last year, both of whom took a dim view of Big Pharma, should’ve been an obvious red flag. The fact that such utterly unlikely ideological bedfellows as Sanders and Sen. Ted Cruz recently joined together on a bill to loosen the restrictions on importing drugs was another. 

The industry’s crusade to exempt itself from the Inter Partes review process for patents, which acts as one of the few checks on its tendency to try to extend its patents indefinitely, went nowhere. Still less successful have been its continued attempts to weaken the 340B drug pricing program, which requires pharmaceutical companies to sell drugs to hospitals serving vulnerable populations as a condition for having access to the Medicaid and Medicare Part B markets.

The issue is a political and moral eyesore for the drug industry, yet all it seems able to do is to go on hiking and trying (with often cringe-worthy results) to defend itself when the inevitable backlash arrives. 

Worse, pharma argues that any and every policy aimed at encouraging competition will somehow endanger patients’ health. Needless to say, the FDA, America’s doctors, and any number of scientific authorities would probably find this ludicrous.  

Conservatives and supporters of Trump’s populist crusade surely have no desire to turn the industry over to the mercy of socialists like Bernie Sanders, but if we don’t want them to pick up the slack, we have no choice but to get tough with pharma and make sure it gets the message that the era of unquestioned high drug prices dies with Emflaza. 

Mytheos Holt (@MytheosHolt) is a senior fellow at the Institute for Liberty. He has worked as a speechwriter for Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), and as a writer for publications including The Federalist.

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