A state board in Colorado is working to make history by becoming the first in the country to cap the price of a drug it deems unaffordable. Amid an aggressive industry lobbying campaign, Colorado lawmakers are now weighing a poison pill measure that would blow up the plan and similar efforts in the future.
The episode highlights the vast power of Big Pharma and how difficult it is to lower drug prices in the United States. The U.S. is an outlier among the rest of the world because Congress for decades barred Medicare from negotiating drug prices, as virtually all other nations do. It’s a major reason why Americans pay the world’s highest prices for products that are developed with support from the U.S. government, even when those drugs have been around for decades.
Read more here: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/colorado-drug-price-enbrel-pharma-1234977554/
