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Having a child who suffers from Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a rare and fatal muscle-wasting disease that affects about 12,000 boys in the United States, is tragic enough. But watching drugmaker Marathon Pharmaceuticals seek a 70-fold increase in the price of a drug that can extend those patients’ lives — that’s beyond the pale. In fact, it’s outrageous enough that it should persuade California lawmakers finally to shine a light on how drug companies set their prices. (2/28)

The pharmaceutical industry in the United States is impressive. It is producing new drugs that can radically improve or even save people’s lives. But as these companies produce amazing advances, why does it appear that some are taking advantage of the very people the drugs are meant to help? Without painting the industry too broadly, if we are serious about controlling health care costs, we must look at the problems in the system. (Eric H. Shultz, 2/27)

Getting the FDA to approve drugs faster is seen as one way to get the access that many patients and their families want. Vice President Pence and many other legislators seem to have been persuaded that the FDA is the roadblock. It isn’t. The real barrier is payers of prescription drug benefits, such as health insurance companies and self-insured employers. The premise that the FDA needs to speed things up worked in the late 1980s when AIDS activists and cancer groups successfully pressured the FDA to make the drug approval process faster. But this won’t work today because payers, which weren’t nearly as influential 30 years ago, now regulate access to drugs. To speed access to new treatments, then, groups need to incorporate payers into their strategies. (Russell Teagarden and Arthur L. Caplan, 2/28)

Emulating a questionable re-branding role model, Valeant Pharmaceuticals International Inc. referred to itself as "New Valeant" in its quarterly earnings slides on Tuesday. Don't expect New Valeant to be much more successful than New Coke. The perma-troubled specialty pharmaceutical company has taken some positive steps under its new leadership team and CEO, including meeting its own reduced full-year revenue guidance for once and setting relatively conservative future goals. But there's not much that's new about the New Valeant. (Max Nisen, 2/28)

The hot new thing in pharma -- "biosimilar" drugs -- is getting so crowded that soon nobody will want to go there any more. Biosimilars are a relatively new wave of generic-like drugs that substitute for biologic drugs, which are made with living cells rather than chemicals. Many big pharma companies have jumped into the market with both feet. (Max Nisen, 2/24)

The American health care system, in many ways, is an outlier among the world’s economically advanced countries. One of the principal differences, and among the most expensive, is that the U.S. government takes a hands-off approach to the price of medicine. Pharmaceutical companies, which face price controls on drugs in most other countries, in effect, make up the difference with the exponentially higher prices they charge in the United States. American consumers, in effect, subsidize the rest of the world’s prescriptions. (3/1)