Cutting Drug Prices? What You Need To Know

This segment of What’s Ahead warns that, despite its popular appeal, putting price controls on prescription drugs would be an enormous mistake. It takes an immense amount of money to develop a new drug, and if companies can’t recover their costs, they won’t make the necessary investments that will give us new therapies for cancer and countless other afflictions. The idea that forcing drug companies to charge less here will force them to charge more to foreign government-run health systems is dead wrong. If governments don’t like the price of a drug, they won’t buy it. That happens already. Japan, for example, has only about half of the new cancer therapies that we have here.

We should make the refusal of governments to pay their fair share of R&D costs a major trade issue, instead of destroying our innovative pharmaceutical industry, especially at a time when China is pushing full steam ahead to develop new medicines. Do we want to be dependent on Beijing in the future for critical therapies?