Drugmakers negotiate new prices with Medicare | Wilnesh News

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Good afternoon! The first round of Medicare drug price negotiations is over — but we still don’t know the final price the U.S. government and drug companies agreed upon.

Medicare will announce new negotiated prices for 10 drugs in early September. These prices will take effect in 2026.

Still, drugmakers appear less concerned about the impact of these new negotiated prices on their businesses than in recent months, at least in the short term. They all agree that the Medicare drug price negotiations pose a long-term threat to drug innovation and profits in the pharmaceutical industry, but the dust has settled for now.

This is based on senior executive comments on the most recent quarterly earnings call Bristol-Myers Squibb and Johnson & JohnsonWaiting for the company.

President Joe Biden’s Inflation Lowering Act gives Medicare the power to negotiate drug prices directly with manufacturers for the first time in the federal program’s nearly 60-year history. The process is designed to make expensive medications more affordable for older Americans.

On July 26, Bristol-Myers Squibb CEO Christopher Boerner confirmed that the company had received the government’s final price for its blood thinner Eliquis and shared the product with the company Pfizer.

Now that the company has seen the price, he said, it is “increasingly confident in our ability to manage the impact of Medicare drug price negotiations on treatment.” Boehner said Bristol-Myers Squibb will provide more details on the expected impact on its investor relations website once Medicare publicly discloses the final price.

at the same time, AbbVie Chief Executive Robert Michael said a day earlier that the drugmaker had factored the expected sales impact of its best-selling leukemia drug Imbruvica into its financial forecasts.

“We have indicated that even with modeling that accounts for this impact, we still expect to achieve our long-term outlook,” Michael said on the company’s earnings call.

On July 17, Johnson & Johnson Global Chairman Jennifer Taubert also said that the company’s long-term growth prospects “still look very good today” after seeing the negotiated prices for the blood thinner Xarelto and the psoriasis treatment drug Stelara.

Novartis Chief Executive Vasant Narasimhan said on July 18 that the short-term impact of Medicare drug price negotiations “may be manageable for our first batch of drugs.” The company’s heart failure drug Entresto was one of the drugs selected for negotiations.

But Narasimhan said that in the long run, the policy “really does not benefit innovation (or) patients in the United States.”

“I think it’s very important to say that this policy is not a good policy. It’s bad for American patients, it’s bad for innovation, and (I) sincerely hope that it is corrected,” he said.

Executives at each drugmaker similarly emphasized their opposition to Medicare drug price negotiations on their respective earnings calls.

“We continue to believe that arbitrary government pricing of life-saving drugs is not good public policy,” Bristol-Myers Squibb’s Boerner said on the company’s earnings call. “Regardless of the short-term dynamics, we remain very concerned about the long-term impact of IRA on innovation. Influence.”

A lawsuit filed by Merck and Novartis over the negotiations is awaiting a district court ruling. Each case raises claims that overlap with lawsuits by Novo Nordisk, AstraZeneca, Boehringer Ingelheim, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Johnson & Johnson and industry trade groups that have been dismissed in recent months.

Please feel free to send Annika any tips, suggestions, story ideas and data: annikakim.constantino@nbcuni.com.

But Northwell Health, New York State’s largest health system, is breaking new ground in the entertainment world. In late July, roll out A television and film production studio called Northwell Studios.

Ramon Soto, chief marketing officer at Northwell Health, said the goal is not to turn the studio into a money-making machine. The health system actually plans to ensure most projects remain cost-neutral.

Instead, Soto said the studio was created to help raise awareness about Northwell, especially since it operates in a competitive and saturated market. The New York metropolitan area is dotted with prestigious health systems and academic medical centers, and Soto’s job is to cut through the noise.

Northwell has dabbled in entertainment projects in the past. It is involved in the Netflix documentary series Lenox Hill, as well as an Academy Award-shortlisted Covid-19 documentary and a documentary on mental health with HBO.

Soto said Northwell Studio is designed to help health systems conduct such programs more regularly.

“The intention behind Northwell Studios is not, ‘Hey, we’re going to show up, this is show business and get our name out there.’ It’s really about creating more of the infrastructure to do this on a regular basis,” Soto said in an interview with CNBC. “I’m not building a soundstage, I’m not building a studio, but I have millions of square feet of space, 21 hospitals and 88,000 employees, caregivers, storytellers.”

Soto said there are already five projects in development, but not all are certain to be completed. So far, unscripted content has been Northwell’s “bread and butter,” he said, and there is an extensive consent process for patients and employees who opt in.

Northwell Studios is also exploring opportunities to produce scripted content, but patients shouldn’t expect to see actors and crew running around the halls.

“We are a health system and we cannot disrupt our operations or patient flow,” Soto said. “We are going to figure out the least disruptive, most impactful way to capture this content.”

Please feel free to send any tips, suggestions, story ideas and data to Ashley at ashley.capoot@nbcuni.com.