Drug companies like to say that their most expensive products are fully worth their breathtaking prices. Now one company is putting its money where its mouth is - by offering a money-back guarantee. Johnson & Johnson has proposed that Britain’s national health service pay for the cancer drug Velcade, but only for people who benefit from the medicine, which can cost $48,000 a patient. The company would refund any money spent on patients whose tumors do not shrink sufficiently after a trial treatment. The groundbreaking proposal, along with less radical pricing experiments in this country and overseas, may signal the pharmaceutical industry’s willingness to edge toward a new pay-for-performance paradigm - in which a drug’s price would be based on how well it worked, and might be adjusted up or down as new evidence came in. ‘I think payers will say, ‘If the product works and it creates value, we will reward you for it,’ ‘ said Anthony Farino, a pharmaceutical industry consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers. ‘ ‘If not, we won’t reward you.’ ‘ It is far too soon to tell whether such a pricing paradigm can actually work, in particular because it can be difficult in […]