IRA list based on politics, pharma veterans say
CMS avoided cancer drugs, prioritized volume over cost to Medicare
CMS’s selection of drugs for the first round of the Medicare drug price negotiation program left a lot of people scratching their heads as drugs that were widely expected to be on the list were missing and those that few had on their bingo cards made the cut. A team of pharma industry veterans says they’ve cracked the code, and that political considerations rather than maximizing cost-savings — or complying with the spirit of the Inflation Reduction Act — drove the selections.
The list was designed to minimize the number cancer drugs affected, and to maximize the number of Medicare beneficiaries whose drug prices will be reduced, Duane Schulthess, CEO of Vital Transformation, John Lamattina, senior partner at PureTech Health, and Harry Bowen, a consulting economist at Vital Transformation, said in a blog post and an interview with BioCentury. ...