logoalt Hacker News

bonsai_spooltoday at 3:41 AM1 replyview on HN

I think 'MFN' is almost propaganda (not a term that existed before 2016-2020 administration) so let's leave that aside.

Are you claiming that the new website is offering lower prices than patients are paying after their co-pay? That is not the case outside the example I presented; moreover, the way the website is organized, there will be no pressure for prices to remain competitive after the initial media attention dies away.

I agree that a hypothetical case where we were paying lower prices would be better for us—but this remains an unrealized hypothetical. One way for us to pay lower prices would be to allow our government to negotiate prices for Medicare/Medicaid recipients, and that is exactly the thing that has been hampered.


Replies

elamjetoday at 4:16 AM

Not arguing on broken internal pricing dynamics that are skewed by all sorts of gov programs and payors.

It’s about external, global pricing dynamics. The site clearly isn’t going to be able to give clean payor/pbm/gov subsidized pricing tables - that is almost an impossible exercise in our system.

What the agreement does accomplish is saying Americans will not pay $1150/mo while EU pays $400/mo while Argentina pays $120/mo.

It guarantees drugs will be greater than or equal to US pricing abroad which effectively forces pharma to find deeper profits outside of the US, or lower prices for all countries to acquire demand.

That is extremely effective. Now it’s up to a really complex group of people to figure out what that means inside our weird system of pharma/pbm/rebates/insurance/medicare.

But that’s not what trumprx is aiming to solve for right?