Summary from P4AD: New research debunks the claim that drug corporations must charge U.S. patients high prices to fund new drugs. The research from doctors at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center is clear: Drug corporations could cut U.S. prices significantly and still cover the full cost the companies claim for research for the entire world.
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March 7, 2017
Nancy Yu, Zachary Helms, and Peter Bach
That pharmaceutical companies charge much more for their drugs in the United States than they do in other Western countries has contributed to public and political distrust of their pricing practices. When these higher US prices (which are sometimes cited as being two to five times the prices in Europe) are challenged, the pharmaceutical industry often explains that the higher prices they charge in the US provide them with the funds they need to conduct their high-risk research.
This claim—that premiums earned from charging US patients and taxpayers more for medications than other Western countries funds companies’ research—is empirically testable. Pharmaceutical companies report their Research and Development (R&D) expenses in public filings, and both they and numerous other sources report a mix of information on their drugs’ prices and sales volumes in the US and other Western countries. These data allowed us to quantify both the premium companies earn and the amount they spend on research. We then assessed the relation between the two.
Top-Selling Drugs
We focused our analysis on the 15 drug companies that manufactured the 20 top-selling drugs globally for 2015. For each company individually and all companies collectively, we estimated how much excess revenue they generated as a result of the higher prices they charged for their products in the US compared to some referent European countries and Canada. For each of the manufacturers, we first derived a company level average by examining the US price premium for each drug in that company’s portfolio that contributed 5 percent or more to US product sales, thus all of the top 20 drugs we had used to identify the companies in our sample were included in the calculation of each company’s average. Once we calculated the average premium compared to the prices of those same products in the referent countries, we applied this premium percentage across each company’s US pharmaceutical revenue base. This gave a proxy for the amount of total US revenue that resulted from US premium pricing. We then compared the amount of “excess revenue” to each company’s worldwide spending on R&D.
US prices came from July 2016 average sales price (ASP) files for physician administered drugs and the September wholesale acquisition costs (published in Truven Health’s Redbook) for retail drugs, the latter of which was reduced by each company’s reported average gross-to-net adjustment. This reduction incorporates in a pooled manner discounts and rebates the company provides to payers, Medicaid, 340B hospitals, and the Veterans Administration as well as other channel intermediaries.
Non-US prices came from four countries with reliable and publicly available pricing: Canada, Denmark, Ireland, and the United Kingdom (UK). The British National Formulary was the primary source for UK drugs; the MIMS database for those that were not included. Canadian prices were pulled from both Quebec and Ontario, and we selected the higher in each case. Irish prices are published in the Irish Medicines Formulary, Danish prices from the Danish Medicine Agency’s Medicinepriser. Rebates and discounts are also offered by drug companies in these other countries, but their magnitude is not published. Therefore, we used the drugs’ list prices in these other countries, a conservative assumption that serves to lessen our estimate of the premium companies earn through charging higher prices to US patients (we did incorporate the estimate of rebates companies offer in US markets).
