Biotech Values

[DewDiligence]

Re: US drug pricing

Here’s a post you may have missed that is relevant to the recent thread on US drug pricing (from #msg-73440441):

the FDA announced that it was considering moving a number of chronically-used drugs to over-the-counter (OTC) status…. FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg justified such a proposal saying that the world is changing and that the FDA has to change with it. She believes that having such drugs available OTC “could free up prescribers to spend time with more seriously-ill patients, reduce the burdens on the already-overburdened health care system and reduce healthcare costs.”

Thus, despite the fact that the FDA has no official mandate to reduce healthcare costs for society, the desire to reduce healthcare costs clearly enters into the FDA’s product-specific decisions.