Americans pay sky-high prices for many prescription drugs. Yet the U.S. pharmaceutical industry says reducing those prices will stifle lifesaving innovation.
In an op-ed published today in STAT, Commonwealth Fund President David Blumenthal, M.D., argues that it’s not an either/or choice. The private sector has come to dominate U.S. biomedical research and development in part because it has free rein to set prices, resulting in huge profits and research funding capacity. By contrast, the National Institutes of Health is able to fund only a fraction of the grant applications it receives.
This imbalance, Blumenthal says, could be corrected by having Medicare pay less for prescription drugs and putting the savings toward more research. “Concerns that cutting industry profits would harm sustained innovation and the future health of Americans would be offset by increasing federal research funding, leading to more truly decisive scientific breakthroughs,” he writes. | 
