While the White House’s efforts to trim prices for drugs covered by Medicare through an international pricing index is a “laudable goal,” using real-world data is the better solution, the author of a recent blog post on the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) writes.
Kirsten Axelsen, visiting fellow at AEI, writes that pharmaceutical companies skirt the pricing index by “refusing to sell their products to the countries used as reference, or by offering a confidentially contracted discount to them and keeping the public price high.”
“A much better way for the federal government to glean valuable information and determine how to spend less on health care, would be to take advantage of the existing data found in the millions of medical records available in America,” she writes.
To read the full blog post, click here.