{"id":24945,"date":"2018-07-13T09:37:44","date_gmt":"2018-07-13T13:37:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/?p=24945"},"modified":"2018-07-16T10:29:02","modified_gmt":"2018-07-16T14:29:02","slug":"the-price-and-importance-of-innovation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/24945\/the-price-and-importance-of-innovation\/","title":{"rendered":"The Price and Importance of Innovation"},"content":{"rendered":"

America’s pharmaceutical innovators lead the world<\/a>, saving and improving people’s lives on a daily basis.\u00a0 But relentless efforts to move toward a single-payer system and impose destructive price controls threaten our continuing progress.<\/p>\n

Drug maker Biogen recently announced exciting results of a clinical trial<\/a> for a new drug to treat Alzheimer\u2019s disease. Yet, despite the promise that this could be a breakthrough that gets us closer to a cure, the medical community and families with loved ones suffering from the disease are holding their collective breath.<\/p>\n

Why? Because we\u2019ve been down this road before.<\/p>\n

Alzheimer\u2019s is one of the most complex and pernicious medical conditions that we face, with no known cure and an immense emotional and economic toll. Worse, the rate of diagnosis is increasing<\/a> and estimates suggest the cost of the disease has already surpassed $259 billion.\u00a0 According to one Alzheimer\u2019s Association spokesperson, it will “bankrupt Medicare<\/a>.” By 2050, the cost of care for Alzheimer\u2019s patients could exceed $1 trillion annually<\/a>.<\/p>\n

That is a crisis medical professionals are rushing to solve, but progress has been slow. An estimated 99.6 percent<\/a> of Alzheimer\u2019s drug “candidates” (i.e. experimental drugs designed to treat Alzheimer\u2019s) fail.<\/p>\n

In 2018 alone, high profile failures in Phase 3 clinical trials<\/a> from drug makers like Eli Lilly and Merck represent decades of work and hundreds of millions of dollars in research yielding little to no results. Even Biogen\u2019s announcement, as promising as it is, has only a 50 percent chance of gaining FDA approval<\/a>, according to analysts.<\/p>\n

The issue of high drug prices is real, but too often the public doesn\u2019t understand the immense risk \u2013 and cost \u2013<\/span> pharmaceutical companies take on to research and develop new treatments for devastating diseases like Alzheimer\u2019s. While everyone hopes Biogen\u2019s new drug is a success, many drugs \u2013 including many recent potential treatments for Alzheimer\u2019s \u2013 never make it through the clinical trials to market. What\u2019s worse, the lack of transparency in our health care payment system drives costs up even further.<\/p>\n

Drug makers invest hundreds of millions of dollars and more into developing new treatments and cures, with no guarantees their research and development will yield results.\u00a0 That risk must be protected to ensure the continued motivation to strive for better treatments and new cures.<\/p>\n

Efforts to cap prices and leverage government buying power via a single-payer system threaten to curtail research and delay or eliminate future cures. It\u2019s a gamble that the United States cannot make, both for our own health and for future generations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

America’s pharmaceutical innovators lead the world, saving and improving people’s lives on a daily basis.\u00a0 But relentless efforts to move toward a single-payer system and impose destructive price controls threaten our continuing progress. Drug maker Biogen recently announced exciting results of a clinical trial for a new drug to treat Alzheimer\u2019s disease. Yet, despite the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[5030,4806,12,4805,52],"class_list":["post-24945","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts","tag-alzheimers-disease","tag-drug-costs","tag-health-care","tag-pharmaceuticals","tag-single-payer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24945","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24945"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24945\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24956,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24945\/revisions\/24956"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}