(New York) Several large pharmaceutical companies have decided to participate in negotiations to lower the price of ten drugs treating serious pathologies in the United States, and success in this area would be a favorable element for President Joe Biden before the elections of 2024.
The American executive noted in a press release on Tuesday that these groups had initially displayed frank opposition – several launched legal proceedings – to the prospect of seeing “Medicare”, the health insurance plan for those over 65 years in the United States, being able to negotiate the selling price of their flagship products.
These are treatments prescribed for blood clots, diabetes, heart problems, psoriasis and blood cancers.
These include Farxiga from the Swedish-British group AstraZeneca (diabetes), Entresto from the Swiss Novartis (heart problems) or the anticoagulant Eliquis from the American Bristol-Myers Squibb which is prescribed to more than 3.7 million beneficiaries of Medicare.
“In total, the ten drugs selected for negotiation represented a disbursement [from seniors] of $3.4 billion for approximately nine million Medicare enrollees in 2022,” the White House noted.
The Biden administration is not saying exactly how much it wants to lower the bill, saying only that it hopes for a “significant” reduction.
The president has made lowering the price of medicines one of his major projects and, criticized by his opponents for the high level of inflation, he promised to “stand up to ‘Big Pharma'”, a term which designates large pharmaceutical groups.
This reform is part of the major law called the “Inflation Reduction Act” (IRA), a vast energy transition and social reform program.
Several pharmaceutical groups immediately took legal action, but refusing to participate in the negotiations exposed them to bitter consequences, such as tax sanctions.
The Amgen group also stressed in a press release on Tuesday that it had only agreed to negotiate “because of the legal deadline”, while remaining convinced that the program was “illegal and prevented medical progress”.
Similarly, Novartis claimed that negotiating represented its “only viable option”: “if we had not agreed to sign the negotiation agreement, Novartis would have been exposed to excessive and crippling fines.”
A spokesperson for Johnson and Johnson, whose two drugs are affected, noted that the company continues to “believe that the IRA’s drug pricing measures harm the innovation ecosystem.”
For its part, the Danish laboratory Novo Nordisk considered that the executive’s project was “not the right approach”, but that it would “comply with the legislation”.
In announcing the filing of an appeal on Friday, he called the price control program imposed by the government “unconstitutional.”
Merck, for its part, filed a complaint in June against what it considered “extortion”.
The new prices for these ten drugs are only to be implemented after January 2026.
Medicare should be able to negotiate prices for up to 60 drugs over the next four years, and up to 20 more each year after that.
According to a study by the Rand Corporation, the United States pays on average 2.5 times more for prescription drugs than, for example, France.
