While the PBM Express Scripts declared plans to bring cancer drug plans down, the drug manufacturers and investors aren't too worried about the high cost of some of the specialty drugs, according to this article in Bloomberg.
President Barack Obama, prominent cancer doctors and health insurers are all warning about the need to control the surging prices of new drugs.
Drugmakers and their investors aren’t acting worried at all, especially when it comes to cancer medicine. In the wake of AbbVie Inc’s $21 billion pact to buy the maker of a $100,000-a-year leukemia drug, the pharmaceutical industry and Wall Street are signaling they don’t expect the brakes on pricing any time soon in the oncology field. Companies that are developing cancer drugs rose in reaction to both the deal and regulatory approval of a $12,500-a-month treatment from Bristol-Myers Squibb Co for treating a lung malignancy.
“Oncology is a different ballgame,” AbbVie Chief Executive Officer Rick Gonzalez said in an interview. “You’re talking about life and death for these patients, it is not something you want to randomly start to manage in a way that would create risk for those patients.”
Link to the complete article in Bloomberg: http://bloom.bg/1AXvtBI
Managed Care Reflections: A Q&A With A. Mark Fendrick, MD, and Michael E. Chernew, PhD
December 2nd 2025To mark the 30th anniversary of The American Journal of Managed Care (AJMC), each issue in 2025 includes a special feature: reflections from a thought leader on what has changed—and what has not—over the past 3 decades and what’s next for managed care. The December issue features a conversation with AJMC Co–Editors in Chief A. Mark Fendrick, MD, director of the Center for Value-Based Insurance Design and a professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor; and Michael E. Chernew, PhD, the Leonard D. Schaeffer Professor of Health Care Policy and the director of the Healthcare Markets and Regulation Lab at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts.
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