Freedom Line Blog

We at CFIF often highlight the clear and present danger that drug price control schemes pose to American consumers, who benefit from our private pharmaceutical sector that leads the world – by far – in innovation.  A new lung cancer treatment breakthrough in the form of Amgen’s Lumakras illustrates that interrelationship.

Simply put, Lumakras reduced the risk of progression by 34% compared to chemotherapy in patents with advanced lung cancer, which is particularly welcome considering lung cancer’s especially low survival rate (18.6% over five years, and just 5% for advanced forms).  The breakthrough required years of research and enormous amounts of investment, however, which The Wall Street Journal notes makes Lumakras the type of innovation put at risk by new drug price controls recently enacted by Congressional Democrats and the Biden Administration:

The drug is by no means a cure, but progress occurs at the margin and some patients who had what amounted to a death sentence now have hope to live.  Lumakras is also much less brutal than chemotherapy.

Yet the drug might not have been developed had the Medicare take-it-or-leave-it negotiations that Democrats recently enacted been in effect earlier.  Their price controls will penalize in particular small-molecule drugs like Lumakras that have the potential to help large numbers of patients.  Within six years, Lumakras could be targeted by bureaucrats for price controls and the payoff on Amgen’s investment could vanish.

The reason for that is simple.  Straightforward economic principles dictate the inevitable negative blowback from government price controls, whether in the form of 1970s gas lines here in the U.S. or food shortages in Venezuela.

Even the United Nations World Health Organization (WHO) warns explicitly about these negative consequences of price controls on drug innovation:

[P]rice controls, combined with the threat of market lockout or intellectual property infringement, prevent drug companies from charging market rates for their products, while delaying the availability of new cures to patients living in countries implementing those policies.  

Closer to home, a recent University of Chicago study quantified the destructive effect of drug price controls on future lifesaving innovations:

The United States has fewer restrictions on price than other countries, but the Biden Administration has announced their goal to lower drug prices through greater price regulation…  [N]ew drug approvals will fall by 32 to 65 approvals from 2021 to 2029 and 135 to 277 approvals from 2030 to 2039.  These significant drops in new drug approvals will lead to delays in needed drug therapies, resulting in worse health outcomes for patients.  

As the University of Chicago points out, the U.S. maintains a more market-oriented approach to pharmaceutical innovation than other developed nations, which benefits American consumers.  Of 270 new medicines introduced here in the U.S. since 2011, for instance, Canadians could only access 52% of them, the Germans 67%, the British 64%, the French 53%, the Japanese 48% and the Australians just 41%.  Moreover, the U.S. accounts for two-thirds of all new drugs introduced to the world.

The real-world numbers speak for themselves.  Americans benefit immensely from our world-leading pharmaceutical sector, and Lumakras offers just the latest welcome example.  The sooner the recent drug price control schemes are repealed or scaled back, the more Americans who suffer from cancer and other ailments stand to benefit.

CFIF has continuously sounded the alarm on dangerous drug price control efforts, which will only do what artificial price controls always do – cause shortages of the very products they attempt to regulate.  The numbers speak for themselves.

Today, The Wall Street Journal editorial board cogently addresses the looming bankruptcy of Medicare and Social Security, and along the way nicely makes that point that we and others have been making, while also pointing out that drug prices have actually remained flat while prices for other products and services have skyrocketed:

Democrats blame Big Pharma for bankrupting Medicare, but annual Part D prescription drug costs have grown on average 1% over the last five years.  That’s far less than inflation, GDP and other Medicare spending. Even expensive drugs that grow spending in the short run can reduce long-term health spending.

Consider Hepatitis C treatments, which public-health scolds lambasted as too pricey when they launched nearly a decade ago.  Prices have since plummeted 75% from about $100,000 per course thanks to market competition.  A Department of Health and Human Services analysis estimates the treatments reduce patient health costs by about $16,000 annually and will save Medicaid $12 billion after this year.

Once the hospital trust fund runs dry, spending will have to be slashed by 10%.  The Democratic solution is to let Medicare “negotiate” drug prices — their euphemism for price controls.  But this will reduce the incentive to develop innovative treatments for hard-to-treat conditions like Alzheimer’s.  The result may be higher Medicare spending over the long term.“

Artificial government efforts to impose price controls never work, whatever the product, whatever the time and whatever the flimsy rationalization.  America leads the world in producing lifesaving pharmaceuticals – 2/3 of all new drugs introduced worldwide, in fact – so we mustn’t tolerate Biden Administration or Congressional efforts to try this failed proposal yet again.  The stakes for us all are too high to re-learn that lesson the hard way.

In our latest Liberty Update, we highlight an eye-opening new study confirming how drug price controls kill pharmaceutical investment and innovation at the worst possible time, when America and the entire world depend upon them more than ever.

In similar vein, American Enterprise Institute (AEI) Adjunct Fellow and healthcare expert Michael Rosen nicely illustrates how the omicron variant of Covid has paused the destructive global effort to suspend enforcement of patent rights belonging to lifesaving vaccine developers:

But the new omicron variant of the virus has intervened, shelving the planned WTO meeting and throwing into continued contrast the supposed haves and have-nots of vaccine protection…  But the EU has held firm in resisting the vaccine waiver, and rightly so.”

Unfortunately, even the EU remains too accommodating of calls to kill the goose that lays the golden vaccine eggs, but hopefully this latest experience brings greater collective wisdom.  If we seek to maximize healthcare and pharmaceutical innovation, the solution isn’t any secret.  Get bureaucrats and suffocating price controls and patent threats out of the way.

Although the year 2020 was a trying one in so many ways, one bright spot that we at CFIF repeatedly highlighted is the wondrous way in which America’s pharmaceutical sector came to the rescue, achieving in one year what typically takes a decade or more:  devising and perfecting not one, but multiple lifesaving vaccines.  It’s therefore no surprise, but welcome nonetheless, that Americans’ approval of our healthcare sector and its workers skyrocketed.  Their remarkable achievements have not gone unnoticed:

Medical Sector Approval Skyrocketed

There’s a destructive campaign underway to encourage government confiscation of patents from pharmaceutical innovators and dictate the price for Remdesivir and other drugs.  That’s a terrible and counterproductive policy under any circumstance, but particularly now that private drug innovators are already hacking away at the coronavirus.  In that vein, this helpful image illustrates the vast disparity between private investment and National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding that some seem to think justifies patent confiscation, price controls or other big-government schemes:

Private Investment Dwarfs NIH Funding

In this week’s Liberty Update, we highlight how cheap slurs against “Big Pharma” have suddenly and rightfully fallen silent amid the coronavirus pandemic, as people understand that private pharmaceutical innovators offer the best hope for new vaccines and treatments.  Along with strong patent protections, one of the key components in unleashing America’s pharmaceutical innovators – who lead the world by producing an astounding two-thirds of new medicines worldwide – is an emphasis on free-market principles, as opposed to socialized models that stifle innovation and prevent new drugs from reaching even developed nations’ consumers.  Our friends at the Heritage Foundation offer a nice illustration of that correlation:

Freedom Means Innovation

.

Continuing our theme of highlighting pharmaceutical innovators and innovation in a moment like this,  from Fulton County, Georgia:

The Promise of Pharmaceutical Innovation