Have you been amazed at top gymnasts transiting a balance beam? Just four inches wide, the balance beam challenges athletes to jump, skip, flip, and dismount without falling off to either side. A similar balancing act is what’s needed to deal with high drug costs. Policymakers must transit to success without falling off, and in turn harming patients’ health.
Skyrocketing drug prices present an enormous problem for Texans, and the harshest consequences will continue to fall on the state’s most disadvantaged — including those who are elderly and those with disabilities.
Pill splitters are common, used to extend prescriptions by cutting pills into half doses. So, why not simply adopt price-cutting strategies for prescription drugs?
Dennis BorelBecause true success must also include access to needed medicines. Take the example of international price indexes, where the actions of foreign governments would set the prices in the USA. It sounds good when you see lower drug prices in those countries, but not so good when you see how access is limited. Americans have access to 87% of new medicines within three months whereas Canadians have access to only 46% with a 15-month delay. Not such a good trade-off!
We live in an exciting era of treatment advances, look at the wealth of medicines and vaccines developed rapidly to address Covid. We can’t afford to stifle innovation, nor access to life-saving medicines.
That’s why negotiating prices for Medicare Part D prescription drugs is literally and figuratively bad medicine. Let’s be clear when you hear the term Medicare price negotiations what it really means is price-setting or, put another way, it’s nothing more than empowering government to pick winners and losers and limit access to lifesaving medicines. Let’s also be clear that drug price negotiations already takes place in Medicare Part D; it’s just done by the private plans that operate in Part D, not the federal government.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office acknowledges that cost-control policies like the proposed price negotiations for Medicare prescription drugs would conservatively lead to 59 fewer new treatments over the next 30 years.
Patients and their caregivers rightly push back on anything that might delay access to current prescription medicines or, for those with disabilities and rare diseases, anything that might delay the development of and access to cutting-edge new therapies.
In fact, the Kaiser Family Foundation found 65% of Americans oppose negotiation if it leads to less research and development of new treatments or if it limits people’s access to medicines once they come to market.
Yes, we have an expensive healthcare system. A major reason is that the American system limits access to preventive and early intervention care to keep people as healthy as possible leaving our fellow citizens to get progressively sicker until they can get treatment at expensive emergency rooms and hospitals.
We should not limit access to the right medicines at the right time and risk unnecessary and costly health declines. A better way would be for Congress to focus more on reducing the costs of Americans’ healthcare premiums, deductibles and copays, not price-setting prescription drugs.
It’s a balancing act, but one that’s possible if you focus on patient access, not price-setting.
Editor's Note: The above guest column was penned by Dennis Borel, executive director of the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities. The group can be found online at txdisabilities.org. The above column appears in The Rio Grande Guardian International News Service with the permission of the author.
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