Pelosi is moving forward with a draconian plan to limit US prices to an international benchmark. For now, the “bill” is a three-page outline subject to considerable legislative drafting – and so extreme as to rule out bipartisan compromise for the time being.

Drug costs make up 60% of the total cost of cancer care, participants in the Medicare Oncology Care Model have found. But efforts to manage spending under the demonstration have so far focused instead on areas that represent a smaller portion of overall costs, such as hospitalizations.

UK members of parliament have called on pharmaceutical companies to be more transparent in their pricing process and to improve the way they gather and present data for health technology appraisals. They also say that industry rebates should be ring fenced to fund new medicines.

Absent any legislative remedy, an administrative fix could provide manufacturers with confidence that value-based arrangements won’t trigger a new best price, Duke Margolis policy experts propose.

Former US FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb makes a case for regional or national risk pools to ensure pediatric patients get timely access to gene therapy like the upcoming treatments for sickle cell disease.

Canada’s R&D drug industry says it approached the court as a “necessary step,” given the significant impact of the pricing reforms.

It is now a common assertion among insurers that one of the many challenges they face in covering high-priced specialty therapies is that drugs are approved with “less evidence” than used to be the case. That is more myth than reality – but a very dangerous myth if it isn’t corrected by the US FDA and the drug industry.

Vertex has managed to secure a deal to provide Scottish cystic fibrosis patients with access to Orkambi and Symkevi. The promise of real world data and a price discount has convinced the Scottish government to say yes to the treatments, which had earlier been rejected by the Scottish Medicines Consortium.

The most important thing to know about a draft version of the House Democratic leadership’s proposed drug price negotiation plan is that it is still just a draft – not the draft – much less a bill that could pass the Democratic controlled House, to say nothing of the GOP controlled Senate.