SJU: Policy decisions and increasing global competition have real consequences for American patients. Government drug pricing policies, for example, weaken the incentives needed for long-term, high-risk investments in new drugs. When those incentives go away, companies pull back, and patients have less success.
Also, price controls are being sold as a quick fix to affordability and access to drugs, but evidence shows the opposite is true. Patients rarely benefit from these policies because they do nothing to rein in insurers and PBMs who decide which drugs will be covered, what patients will pay, and what rules patients must follow to access prescription drugs. This dynamic sets up a vicious cycle: Policymakers cut prices to provide relief to voters, but the savings go to middlemen rather than patients and pressure builds for tighter controls that don’t fix the real problem.
Meanwhile, patients experience the downside of price controls. take a patient like Linda Pfeiffer, Which manages vision loss from type 2 diabetes and diabetic retinopathy. The treatments Linda relies on exist today only because companies have incentives to invest in breakthrough research. Linda worries that drug pricing policies will make it harder for companies to justify similar investments in the future. For patients like Linda, biopharmaceutical innovation isn’t theoretical; This is the real possibility of finding new, potentially curative, treatments for his chronic disease.
Global changes matter as much as policy decisions. If biopharmaceutical leadership shifts to another country, future breakthroughs will be discovered, developed, and manufactured elsewhere, impacting everything from approval timelines to drug availability and even increasing national security risks if the US becomes dependent on geopolitical competitors for successful drugs.
Policy choices determine whether American patients are first in line for new treatments, or whether those treatments are delayed or reach American patients at all.