Last year the state of Tennessee health plan paid $62,000 apiece for 775 patients who were on the biologic drug Humira. Humira is used for autoimmune and inflammatory conditions like rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn’s disease and others. All told Tennessee spent nearly $50 million on one drug. This is a lot of money for only 775 patients. What is even more amazing is that nine (9) different new drugs biosimilar to Humira just hit the market. The lowest price for a generic copy is $994 a month. That is shy of $12,000 a year, or about $50,000 a year cheaper than Humira.
Category: Drug Prices & Regulations
Monday Links
- GAO: unemployment insurance fraud during the pandemic as high as $135 billion. (That is roughly $1,350 for every household in America.)
- Medicare targets cheap, generic, life saving drug for price “negotiation.” (WSJ)
- Rich countries get quality medicines; the poor sometimes get poison. But, contra NYT, the solution is markets, not regulation.
- Court tells the FDA to stop playing doctor. (WSJ)
- As a percent of income, lower-income people cheat more on their income taxes than higher income people. HT: David Henderson
- Did the eradication of hookworms cause modern allergies?
Saturday Links
- Did the Social Sciences Research Network (SSRN) censor a meta study showing that lock downs had no effect on covid?
- A smart pill — the size of a blueberry! — can be used to automatically detect key biological molecules in the gut that suggest problems, and wirelessly transmit the information in real time.
- Robin Hansen: World population will peak in about thirty years, and then will likely fall by half every generation or two.
- How the government sets Medicare prices: it’s “a pattern of combining dated, imprecise cost reports with idiosyncratic and opaque adjustments that were not constructed to guarantee the best outcomes for the dollars spent.”
Jindal & Katebi: Better Ways to Lower Drug Costs
Former Louisiana governor (also former HHS secretary) Bobby Jindal and Charlie Katebi wrote an editorial in the Washington Examiner explaining how to rein-in high drug costs. To start with they don’t like the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). President Biden championed the IRA as a way for Medicare to lower drug costs for a small, insignificant number of hyper expensive drugs. For the uninitiated, the IRA allows Medicare to identify 10 high-cost drugs and negotiate the cost down, using punitive excise taxes if drug companies refuse. Jindal and Katebi have a point. The IRAs price negotiation formula is a Rube Goldberg-type of policy mechanism that only Democrats’ legislative writers would think up.