US to name first 10 drugs for Medicare price negotiation
investing.comBy Patrick Wingrove
(Reuters) — The Biden administration on Tuesday is expected to release its list of 10 prescription medicines that will be subject to the first-ever price negotiations by the U.S. Medicare health program that covers 66 million people.
President Joe Biden’s signature Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), signed into law last year, allows the Medicare health program for Americans aged 65 and over to negotiate prices for some of its most costly drugs.
The list will kick off the negotiation process for the 10 drugs whose new prices would go into effect in 2026. The program aims to save $25 billion per year on drug prices by 2031.
Analysts expect medicines on the list to include Merck & Co's diabetes drug Januvia, blood thinner Eliquis from Bristol Myers (NYSE:BMY) Squibb and Pfizer (NYSE:PFE), and AbbVie (NYSE:ABBV)'s leukemia treatment Imbruvica.
«Congress has taken the pharmaceutical industry on and said it is not acceptable anymore to have prescription drug prices that are more than 250% higher than in other nations,» Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar, who has long advocated for lower healthcare costs, said.
Drugmakers including Bristol Myers, Johnson & Johnson (NYSE:JNJ), Merck, Britain's AstraZeneca (NASDAQ:AZN), Japan's Astellas Pharma and Germany-based Boehringer Ingelheim, as well as business groups have sued the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which oversees the Medicare agency, in an effort to derail the price-setting process.
They argued that the program will hurt innovation and that it violates their rights under the First, Fifth and/or the Eighth amendments of the U.S. Constitution.
Americans pay more for prescription drugs than patients in all other developed nations. The White
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