Yesterday, we explained how H.R. 3 would affect new drug development. Today, we look at the impact on jobs.
Remind me—what’s H.R. 3? The proposed legislation would require drug manufacturers to negotiate prices with the government based on an international price index of prices paid in several other countries—here’s Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s fact sheet explaining what’s in the bill.
Legislation with price control models would lead to fewer new drugs on the market—as many as 60 forgone medicines in the first three decades alone, as we explained yesterday.
Price controls would also “devastate our region’s standing as a leader in the life sciences as well as our states’ economies,”write more than two dozen biotech and business groups in Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.
In these three states alone, the legislation would “imperil”…
- 575,000 jobs “directly and indirectly tied to the biopharmaceutical sector,” with the region losing “roughly 131,500 jobs,” according to a recent study.
- $16 billion “spent by biopharmaceutical companies on vendor companies in these states each year.”
- $154 billion in “annual economic output,” with the region losing $35.4 billion.
It would also lead to “dramatic reductions in the almost $100 billion invested in research annually by the biopharmaceutical industry in pursuit of lifesaving treatments and cures for Alzheimer’s, breast cancer, diabetes, rare diseases and many other medical conditions,” they say.
The bottom line: “We agree that we can, and we must, work to lower health care costs for our citizens. However, this goal should not be achieved by sacrificing future medical innovation and upending one of our region’s key economic drivers,” they conclude.
Read More: American biomedical innovation is leading the world—why would we stifle that?
More Health Care News:
Reuters: Biogen offers free Alzheimer's drug as Medicare payment uncertainty remains
“In order to expedite treatment, Biogen has begun to provide Florida's First Choice Neurology with free-of-charge Aduhelm.”
STAT News: Inside Pfizer’s labs, ‘variant hunters’ race to stay ahead of the pandemic’s next twist
“A team of ‘variant hunters,’ as they call themselves, race to track changes in the fast-mutating SARS-CoV-2. A ‘virus farmer’ grows the latest variants so researchers can test how they fare against the vaccine. And a colleague known as the ‘graphing unicorn’ converts the data into intelligible results overnight.”
