The Lancet | July 29, 2023
The pharmaceutical industry’s arguments “cut against substantial precedents”, said Zachary Baron, Associate Director of the Health Policy and the Law Initiative at the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University Law Center. Price negotiations are already an intricate part of the government’s health-care system. “Federal health programmes purchase goods and services from doctors, hospitals, health insurers, and drug companies and many accept payments that are less than the reimbursement available from the commercial markets”, he said. The 2003 prohibition against negotiating drug prices “has always been an aberration in the Medicare program”.