PROFESSOR SARA GERKE CO-AUTHORS A NEW PIECE IN THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HEALTH SERVICES
October 2021 — Professor Sara Gerke co-authors a new piece in the International Journal of Health Services on what the United States can learn from the pharmaceutical pricing strategies adopted by Germany. Her co-author is a Professor of Law at Suffolk University. Professor Gerke and her co-author argue that the U.S. could adopt similar strategies to those introduced by the 2011 German Pharmaceutical Market Reorganization Act. In particular, they underline 10 lessons for drug pricing reform in U.S. private insurance and federal programs.
Key takeaways are below:
- Enacting statutes that establish incentives for manufacturers to negotiate prices.
- Ensuring rapid access to new drugs by free pricing at the product launch and capped reimbursement after the first year.
- Controlling prices and providing proper incentives for manufacturers by capping reimbursement based on the added medical benefit of a new drug.
- Setting reimbursement based on the added medical benefit of a drug can be coupled with external reference pricing to generate prices comparable to those other countries pay.
- Basing external reference pricing on net prices rather than official prices.
- Stopping annual drug price increases by setting maximum reimbursement.
- Capping reimbursement can work together with market competition where therapy choices exist.
- Promoting accountability by permitting affected parties to answer to expert assessment of added medical benefit.
- Arbitration of reimbursement disagreements is a legitimate means to ascertain prices without a negotiated agreement.
- Avoiding unfavorable aspects of pharmaceutical cost controls by capping reimbursement in accordance with an assessment of a new drug’s added medical benefit.
To read the full piece, click here.
Professor Sara Gerke is an Assistant Professor of Law at Penn State Dickinson Law. Her research focuses on the ethical and legal challenges of artificial intelligence and big data for health care and health law in the United States and Europe. Before joining Penn State Dickinson Law, Professor Gerke served as a Research Fellow in Medicine, Artificial Intelligence, and Law at the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School for the Project on Precision Medicine, Artificial Intelligence, and the Law (PMAIL).