With CMS set to announce this week the “maximum fair prices” for 2027’s cohort of drugs under the IRA’s “negotiation” program and the recent the three-year anniversary of that law’s passage, it seemed a good time to take stock of just how the law is influencing the biopharma investors’ and innovators’ collective drug development choices. A collection of empirical evidence.

A New York Times article gives our economist Richard Xie an excuse to reflect on the nuances of family and community spillover of the benefits of certain medicines, and our industry’s inability or reluctance to try to measure them.

The bottom line is that when it comes to global revenues for innovative medicines, US revenues for “winners” (the top selling drugs) matter most, since these come at the highest profit margin and launch more quickly, and serve as the primary incentive for biomedical innovation.

All else being equal, people care more about outcomes that happen in the near future than about outcomes that happen later. The discount rate represents how much timing matters. We sit down with Josh Cohen, Deputy Director of the Center for the Evaluation of Value and Risk in Health (CEVR) at the Institute for Clinical Research and Health Policy Studies at Tufts Medical Center, and Research Professor of Medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine, to learn about how changes to the discount rate can alter how we value medicines.

Generalized cost-effectiveness analysis (GCEA), a framework to comprehensively assess the societal value of innovative health technologies, will be officially debuted at the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research (ISPOR) conference in Atlanta this week