Does a New Regeneron-HHS Deal Signal a New Approach to Pricing Provisions?

Sen. Bernie Sanders has been kind of making a stink about the Biden administration’s lack of action on drug prices, going so far as to hold up the nomination of the next NIH director. This has felt kind of weird to me, given that Biden did deliver the Inflation Reduction Act and Medicare price controls.

So I was curious exactly what Bernie wanted. A commitment to dropping a bomb and breaking patents with march-in rights? Something else?

On Friday, we got an answer, though I missed it. HHS and Regeneron signed a deal for a COVID-19 antibody that included a provision that said that the U.S. couldn’t pay more for the med than any other high-income country. That was apparently the kind of thing Bernie wanted to see: he cited the deal in his announcement that he’d allow the NIH pick to move forward.

The bigger question is whether this a random one-off -- Regeneron’s leadership has been known to take provocative pricing stances, and HHS probably needed this kind of win -- or reflects a broader change in the kind of deals the government will seek.

I’ll be listening for rumblings on whether it’s the latter …

• Roche had its annual Pharma Day yesterday, and they spent a brief moment talking about their pricing approach, which I find useful and refreshing. I captured the slide in this LinkedIn post, if you’re interested to see how Roche positioned things.

• I hate to tell anyone that they really need to read a 52-page paper written by economists, but you all probably really need to read this 52-page paper by Northwestern’s Craig Garthwaite and Amanda Starc. It’s pretty much a complete accounting of U.S. drug pricing, and it’s the single best resource for going from zero to 60 in the subject.

• Yes, PBMs came across as the villains in yesterday’s WSJ story on generic drugs. But Mark Cuban reminded everyone that employers deserve some blame, too, for allowing the status quo.

• We have new COVID-19 boosters, which will be sold in the commercial market. There wasn’t a lot of chatter about that switcheroo in the coverage of the approval -- perhaps because it probably won’t be noticeable to most Americans -- but the issue of cost is still likely to become a flashpoint one of these days.

• GoodRx and Walgreens are getting together to drive even-lower GoodRx prices on a handful of specific medicines. But it’s not clear how GoodRx is doing it or how much additional savings it’ll really deliver. My own spot check found that Walgreens didn’t necessarily have lower prices on the selected medicines, and cash-pay pharmacies were often cheaper, too. I’m left to wonder if there is a point where slightly lower costs aren’t worth the added complexity. Are we entering a paradox-of-choice situation?

• Bloomberg Law resurfaced a longstanding IRA concern that hasn’t been much discussed lately: employers are worried that drugmakers will try to make up losses from medicines that are price-controlled in Medicare by raising costs in the commercial market and discouraging biosimilars.

• And I’m not the only one who thought the Health Affairs Forefront yesterday on “innovation bullying” was ridiculous. AEI’s Brian Miller pokes fun at the concept in an amusing LinkedIn thread. What a bully!