Why Prescription Drugs Are So Expensive and What the State Can Do About It

A transcript of this event is available here.

In recent years the price consumers pay for many brand name prescription drugs and even some generics has increased. There are several factors behind these increases. One has to do with the type of the drugs being developed today and the smaller number of patients they target. Another involves middlemen that absorb many of the price discounts provided by drug makers. And a third has to do with the regulations coming from both Washington and the states.

This panel will address each of those problems and examine possible state solutions.

Merrill Matthew, Ph.D., is a resident scholar with the Institute for Policy Innovation. He is a health policy expert and contributor at Forbes.com. He also serves on the Texas Advisory Committee of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Dr. Matthews is a past president of the Health Economics Roundtable for the National Association for Business Economics, the largest trade association of business economists and served for 10 years as the medical ethicist for the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center’s Institutional Review Board for Human Experimentation.

Peter Pitts is President and co-founder of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest. He previously worked for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as an associate commissioner, a policy advisor, and a supervisor of the FDA’s Office of Public Affairs, Office of the Ombudsman, Office of Special Health Issues, Office of Executive Secretariat, and Advisory Committee Oversight and Management. He served on the agency’s obesity working group and counterfeit drug taskforce. His book, Become Strategic or Die, is widely recognized as a cutting edge study of how leadership, in order to be successful over the long term, must be combined with strategic vision and ethical practice. He is the editor of the new book, Coincidence or Crisis, a discussion of global prescription medicine counterfeiting. He has served as an adjunct professor at Indiana University’s School of Public and Environmental Affairs and Butler University.

Lunch is free for attendees who RSVP. Please register online here. 

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