Price controls on medications will gut American medical innovation | Opinion – nj.com
By Sandip Shah and Deep Patel
When COVID-19 hit, we started from zero. We didn’t know who would be most vulnerable. We didn’t know how it spread and how dangerous it would be for the essential workers providing health care and keeping grocery stores open.
The only thing we did know was that the fastest vaccine ever developed took four years. Nobody wanted to talk about it, but that was the timeline we were looking at last winter.
Yet today, a little over a year since we entered this masked, distanced, “new normal,” we can already see its end. The light at the end of the tunnel is the vaccine.
What our scientists, researchers and engineers did in 2020 — create and deliver a safe, effective vaccine against a previously unknown disease in record time — was not simply difficult. Nothing like it had ever been done before.
Everyone in the world is grateful for this scientific achievement, and none with more reason than New Jerseyans.
As we all know, our state has posted the highest COVID death rate in the country. How can this be, when New Jersey is one of the wealthiest of the 50 states? Because we are also one of the most unequal.
In New Jersey, our vulnerable neighbors — the aged, the disabled, the poor, people of color — bore the brunt of this pandemic. They caught it, got sicker from it, and died of it more often than those in wealthier and better-connected communities — and endured more economic harm, as well.
From the beginning of the crisis, state and local officials have tried to offset this inequality. But the real game changer, the silver bullet of healthcare equity, has been the vaccine itself, which is proving most valuable to the most vulnerable.
The challenge now is to carry this miraculous progress beyond COVID.
Over the past year, scientists at Pfizer and Moderna, along with numerous other biopharmaceutical research companies, have refined new technologies that they believe could lead to vaccines and treatments for diseases that have outfoxed medical science for millennia. Alzheimer’s. Cancer. Heart disease. No disease is out of reach due to new medical innovations and technologies.
These technologies will also help make sure the next pandemic, inevitable in our global economy and changing climate, is not so devastating.
Finally, by delivering more equity, these innovations can help us remedy the epidemic of distrust among minorities toward a healthcare system that has too often let them down and left them behind.
The way to rebuild trust between people of color and American health care is for the system to prioritize and save Black and brown lives. With the world watching, our COVID vaccines are doing that.
The moment is therefore ripe for America to up its investment in the same people and technologies that produced this achievement. With this blueprint in place, and, thankfully, a presidential administration that respects science, the United States is poised to lead a global medical renaissance.
But to lead, we have to fit our policies to this new scientific moment. Today, we are worried Congress may be fighting the last healthcare battle while putting us at risk of losing the next one.
It’s clear that the heroes in lab coats are the part of our healthcare system that works best. We cannot afford to cut research and development right now, whether directly through mindless fiscal austerity or indirectly through misguided policymaking.
Unfortunately, Congress is again flirting with legislation that embodies the wrong approach. Lawmakers recently reintroduced a bill that failed the Senate back in 2019 — the misleadingly named “Lower Drug Costs Now Act” sponsored by U.S. Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. would impose price controls on medications, similar to those in place in Europe.
Price controls here will mean less money for investment in science. Indeed, the Congressional Budget Office predicts the measure will result in $1 trillion less for research firms over the next decade. This would gut American innovation and degrade the scientific infrastructure we need to address existing inequities and combat the next health crisis.
If the past 15 months have taught us anything, it’s that equity requires more investment, not less.
As we rebuild coming out of the COVID era, Congress will have a choice to make: whether the scientific miracle of the vaccine will be a one-off, or the beginning of a new era of innovation, justice and progress in American health care. Congressman Pallone must help his fellow Democrats in Congress make the right choice.
Sandip Shah is the founder and president of New Jersey-based Market Access Solutions, which develops strategies to optimize patient access to life-changing therapies.
Deep Patel holds a master’s in biomedical engineering and is a director at Market Access Solutions.
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