Op-Ed: Letting the Government Negotiate Drug Prices Won’t Hurt Innovation

The pharmaceutical industry’s claim that allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices would devastate innovationis contradicted by evidence showing that publicly funded research drives most transformative drug discoveries, that large manufacturers spend far more on marketing and buybacks than R&D, and that unconstrained pricing actually incentivizes development of low-risk, minimally innovative products. The authors contend that value-based price negotiation would reward genuinely beneficial drugs while discouraging therapeutically marginal ones, and warn that pharmaceutical lobbying and campaign contributions are the real forces behind congressional opposition to reform.