5 November 2019 - Trading away the UK’s rights to drive down drug prices could cost the NHS half a billion pounds a week.

If the UK loses its ability to negotiate drug prices or to import generic drugs under a trade agreement with the US after Brexit, the NHS’s drug bill could soar from £18 billion to £45 billion a year, a specially commissioned analysis predicts.

The calculations come from Andrew Hill, an expert on drug pricing, and his team in the pharmacology department at Liverpool University, who were asked by Channel 4’s Dispatches television programme to estimate the effects on NHS drug prices of a new US-UK trade agreement. The programme referred to 11 meetings that a Whitehall source said took place between trade officials from both sides of the Atlantic and between British civil servants and the US drug industry.

Read BMJ article