As our industry prepares to collaborate with the next administration and Congress, I joined several leaders at Milken Institute’s Future of Health Summit to discuss the state of innovation and patient access, as well as patient-centric health care reforms that will ensure medicines make their way to patients.
Across the board, we agreed that action is needed to rebuild our health care system so that all patients can access their medicines. Here are my 3 takeaways from the conversation:
- Prevention is crucial in reducing our overall health care spending. The role that medicines and vaccines play in lowering health care costs highlights the need to protect the promising innovation we see in the R&D pipeline today. We’ve seen research that shows half the marked slowdown in Medicare spending growth over a decade ago was due reduced spending on cardiovascular diseases and more than a quarter was due to greater use of cardiovascular medicines.
- The Inflation Reduction Act’s (IRA) negative impact on innovation is well documented, but the repercussions reach far beyond to patients and other entities. With the implementation of price setting, some independent pharmacies may no longer stock certain medicines and providers are facing billions of dollars in payment cuts without corresponding savings for patients.
- In the lame duck session, Congress has an opportunity to implement PBM reform. Holding these middlemen accountable is a bipartisan issue that would lower what patients pay in out-of-pocket costs. This reform includes delinking fees from the list price of medicines and ensuring savings make their way directly to patients.
