“Pearson is one of the few people in this country who’ve had any luck getting the prices for individual drugs under control. The nonprofit he founded, the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (known as ICER), has one purpose—to figure out whether a new drug is worth the price tag or if Big Pharma is taking us for a ride.
For the most part, Pearson says, Americans have no idea what they should be paying for medication. We don’t how much it costs to actually develop a drug; the FDA doesn’t require comparative effectiveness studies, so we don’t know if new drugs work better than existing competitors; and we have little information about how much other consumers are paying for the same products. ‘Patients in America are getting great value for drugs—and we’re getting ripped off,’ Pearson says. ‘The problem is we’ve had little way of knowing when it’s one or the other.'”
Read the full article from Wired here: