Drug Pricing Report Released by NASEM

The most recent example of drug marketing being caught in the crossfire of the drug pricing debate can be found in a report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, which included suppression of consumer marketing in a set of recommendations on how to lower the cost of prescription drugs for patients. One recommendation was that advertising costs should no longer be considered tax deductible as a business expense. The report offers eight recommendations with twenty-seven different actions for their implementation (a sample of actions in each area appears below) to improve the affordability of prescription drugs without discouraging the development of new and more effective drugs for the future. “Over the past several decades, the biopharmaceutical sector in the United States has been successful in developing and delivering effective drugs for improving health and fighting disease, and many medical conditions that were long deemed untreatable can now be cured or managed effectively,” said Norman Augustine, former chairman and CEO of Lockheed Martin Corp., former chairman of the National Academy of Engineering, and chair of the committee that conducted the study and wrote the report. “However, high and increasing costs of prescription drugs coupled with the broader trends in overall medical expenditures, which now equals 18 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product, are unsustainable to society as  whole. Our report seeks to ad...
Source: Policy and Medicine - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs