Policy makers should ‘set their sights higher’ on U.S. drug pricing regulations, researchers say

From MedCity News:

Despite massive resistance to pricing controls in the U.S. from drugmakers, bills introduced into the House and Senate are nowhere near as comprehensive in what they propose compared with existing policies among several peer nations of the U.S., according to a new paper.

For starters, the bills mainly cover only Medicare patients, not patients as a whole, and they don’t incorporate key lessons learned by other countries.

The study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association by University of Pennsylvania researcher Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel and colleagues there and at the medical universities of Harvard and Yale universities, compared the bills – two introduced in the House and one introduced in the Senate – with existing regulations in Australia, France, Germany, Norway, Switzerland and the U.K. In particular, it focused on what the researchers called eight key lessons from those countries’ regulations.