Posted by Michael Wonder on 19 Jul 2017
How do you measure value in a drug — or anything else in medicine?
19 July 2017 - At a swanky hotel in the Theatre District, about a dozen health policy experts and drug development academics gathered Wednesday to talk drug pricing.
Speakers on the Manhattan Institute-curated panel see a future where the amount of money people pay for pharmaceuticals has something to do with how much “value” they provide — but seemed to have more questions than answers about what that actually means.
“How do you assess value?” asked Kenneth Kaitin, who directs the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development. “[Consider] a cancer drug that only extends life by three months but allows you to go home, versus one that extends it a year but you end up staying in the hospital for the year, versus one that delays the progression of the disease but your overall outcome is not any different. There’s so much gray area in this assessment that it alway makes me nervous about discussions that [go like]: ‘If we just are able to measure the value we’ll be able to come up with reasonable pricing.’”
