big pharma

President Joe Biden called out Big Pharma’s biggest scam during his State of the Union speech Thursday: charging Americans far more for the same drugs than patients in other countries.  “I’m gonna get in trouble for saying it,” Biden said. “But if any of you want to get into Air Force One with me and fly to Toronto, Berlin, Moscow, excuse me — well, even Moscow, probably — and bring your prescription with you, and I promise you I’ll get it for you for 40 percent the cost you’re paying now. Same company, same…

A state board in Colorado is working to make history by becoming the first in the country to cap the price of a drug it deems unaffordable. Amid an aggressive industry lobbying campaign, Colorado lawmakers are now weighing a poison pill measure that would blow up the plan and similar efforts in the future. The episode highlights the vast power of Big Pharma and how difficult it is to lower drug prices in the United States. The U.S. is an outlier among the rest of the world because Congress for decades barred…

Big Pharma has invested big money in the organizations planning what a MAGA policy agenda will look like in a new Trump administration. Not surprisingly, that policy playbook contains a major gift for the drug industry: a swift end to the Biden administration’s landmark program to allow Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices. For two decades, Congress barred Medicare from negotiating prescription drug prices, which is a major reason why Americans pay higher prices for drugs than anyone else in the world. In 2022,…

2023 was an important year for patients with sickle cell disease. Prior to CRISPR, the only cure for the life-long ailment was a bone marrow transplant, which is notoriously dangerous and costly. This month, the FDA approved Vertex’s “Casgevy,” a CRISPR-based therapy for the treatment of sickle cell disease in patients 12 and older. The landmark approval made the therapeutic the first genetically edited therapy to reach the general market.Casgevy, which also received the greenlight from regulators in the UK for another…