In the U.S., rising prescription drug prices are the law — at least that’s the way it looks to Leonard Saltz, MD, chief of gastrointestinal oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.

“We have several arms of the government, working in different areas, that are creating the problem,” Saltz told MedPage Today during the recent meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology in Chicago.

The FDA, he said, approves drugs on the basis of efficacy and safety, but is not allowed — by law — to consider price, which in any case is not usually set until after the regulatory OK.

“They may approve a drug that has an extremely small incremental benefit with no input on what sort of price is going to be charged,” he said.

On the other hand, once a drug is approved, Saltz said, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) must cover it, but is not allowed to negotiate lower prices.

“That’s very strange,” Saltz said. “Where else in a free market society do you see the largest customer unable to negotiate for a better price?”

Those two factors combine to skew the market so that prices rise inexorably, Saltz argued.

Other experts reached by […]