July 26, 2017 – Follow Suit

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Anchor lead: Will Maryland’s new law to prevent generic drug price gouging spread nationally? Elizabeth Tracey reports

Should pharmaceutical companies be able to raise the price of generic drugs by thousands of percentage points overnight, in the absence of any increased costs on their part? No, the state of Maryland asserts in a new law. Jeremy Greene, one author of a perspective on the law in the New England Journal of Medicine from Johns Hopkins, says such state actions are increasing nationally.

Greene: We witness the Maryland law as part of the increasing wave of action on the part of the states to take steps to address this increasing problem of escalating drug prices and drug spending. States have seen a substantial portion of their budgetary increase go towards drugs over the past decade, certainly states as actors have become increasingly sensitive to drug prices. We have seen several years now of discussions of drug prices on a federal level that have not led to conclusive actions to actually close these loopholes.  :32

At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.