Inside ICER: Aligning Price and Access with Patient Value

DIA Global Forum

ICER’s President and CEO Sarah K. Emond sat down with DIA’s Wyatt Gotbetter to discuss the ICER approach to evaluating clinical effectiveness and value. Here is a brief excerpt from their conversation:

ICER's Sarah Emond:

"Despite what some people would like to think, the US is not a free market for pricing drugs. Nothing from 'Basic Economics' works here. There’s a government-granted monopoly, which creates a distortion to a free market in terms of supply and demand. There are multiple actors participating in the price and access decision, none of whom are ultimately the one to actually benefit from the product: the patient. The doctors or the clinicians making the decision are not going to benefit from it. The ones paying for it, which is all of us through our health insurance premiums and our taxes, are not the ones benefiting from it. Then you get into conversations about population health and how we can have the most health for the most people with our resources. There’s a lot that does not fit in the beautiful little supply curve that you learn in Basic Economics.

That’s another reason we think that our approach—very public, multistakeholder, lots of drafts released for public comment—contributes to a conversation where all those different parties have something to rely on when they’re thinking about price negotiation and access decisions."

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• Inside Health Policy: FDA Floats Alternative IND Pathway; Experts Flag Need For IRB Overhaul

Key Upcoming Dates

• 4/16: Strengthening the FDA’s Accelerated Approval Pathway: Progress and Unfinished Business -- Final Report
• 4/29: Narcolepsy -- revised Evidence Report

Learn more about ICER’s ongoing and recently completed reports:

• Covid-19
• Hypertension
• IgA Nephropathy
• Narcolepsy
• Parkinson's Disease

Email info@icer.org for more information.

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