Congress has been heavily focused on healthcare this year, specifically the high cost of prescription drugs. This week’s hearing marks the third this year and will focus on pharmacy benefit managers’ (PBMs) role in the astronomically high price of drugs after the pharmaceutical manufacturers pointed the blame towards this group in the last hearing.
Although the question of high drug prices is complex with multiple players involved, no one has been talking about the $2.5 billion wasted each year in ineffective drugs. Scipher’s CEO Alif Saleh writes about this disconnect in an article in Electronic Health Record to highlight that it isn’t just the cost of the drugs that are hurting patients and the industry, but also the lack of understanding of disease biology to predict response to these drugs and the need for more precision medicine.
