Pharma developing and distributing drugs at a fast clip

The Commonwealth Fund recently published a report that compares prices for those first ten drugs in the United States with those in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom—all of which have government price caps. Sanders and his allies will surely point to this report, as it finds that those ten drugs cost three times as much here as they do in our seven peer countries.

But one of the costs of price caps is a lengthy wait for access. Just three of the ten medicines, on average, were available in the seven comparator countries within a year of their launch.

By contrast, seven of those ten were available in the United States within a year of their launch.

Overall, 85% of medicines launched between 2012 and 2021 were available through Medicare and Medicaid as of October 2022. People in the Commonwealth Fund's seven peer countries had access to just 40% of those new medicines.

American patients also got access to new medications on average 2.5 years sooner than those in the not-so-magnificent seven.

Faster access to cutting-edge meds saves lives. One study found that survival gains among Americans with the most common form of lung cancer would have been half as big between 2006 and 2017 if they'd been saddled with the limited access to medications that patients in Australia, Canada, and France had to deal with.

The Inflation Reduction Act's looming price controls won't just penalize current patients by reducing access. They'll harm future patients by resulting in the development of fewer novel drugs.

Price controls will deprive the pharmaceutical industry of revenue that could be invested in research and development. But the caps will also dissuade investors from funding drug discovery.