Pharma Pricing, And The Search For Critical Mass

Pricing pressures are forcing pharmaceutical companies to diversify andconsider never previously-explored options, as they seek to retain success in a hugely competitive industry. Such pressures will continue to shape the industry into a form very different to that of its heyday in the 1980s, says Pharmaceutical Pricing, a new study from FT Management Reports.

A global examination of drug pricing reveals some important points, says study author James Moore. First, not all price controls are visible, such as the price or reimbursement levels set in most of Europe and in Japan. Pricing everywhere is subject to a complex mixture of direct and indirect controls, and governments and drugmakers are realizing how powerful indirect price controls are, and how important they will be in the future.

In the past, the costs of using drugs in disease treatment were examined in isolation, but now it is understood that to make a genuine assessment of disease costs, and to devise effective methods of containing them, the disease's medical and societal costs must be considered as a whole. When drug costs are viewed in this context, it may be shown that the overall disease costs could be reduced by greater spending on drugs, the report notes.