Research

Prices Will Come Down Substantially. Watch.” This is the president of the US talking about drug prices during his State of the Union Message to the US Congress! The New Year is already full of intrigue, and we're only a few weeks into 2018. The last week of January in particular threw a 1 – 2 – 3 punch at the industry: The new US Secretary for Health and Human Services (HHS) Alex Azar was sworn in. On the surface…

Google's Waymo self-driving car project just passed an important milestone, with the arrival of its fully autonomous modified Chrysler vans on the streets of Chandler, Arizona. Uber, GM and others will not be far behind. Society soon will need far fewer roads, parking garages, and of course cars—while hopefully the quality of our lives will see another step-change as it did with the smart phone revolution. And it is all about data and the resulting intelligence. Healthcare systems globally are…

Many of my friends in the pharma world feel that the evolution of pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) in the US has led to their operations and impact becoming increasingly mysterious. While we understand in broad strokes the role they play, their business model has broadened to the extent it has become fuzzy—as if by design. We all harbor general skepticism towards middlemen, and question what actual value they add to the healthcare system. When it comes to PBMs, views on…

An ageing society that is fortunate to benefit from an accelerating flow of innovative therapies must be prepared for an ever-increasing nominal healthcare spending. But can healthcare continue to take a larger share of the economy without starving other essential services for a healthy quality of life? This is an especially sensitive question in the ‘New Normal’ average economic environment of low single digit percent growth rate, when it is difficult to keep the healthcare cost growth rate at less…

President Kennedy successfully persuaded US steel industry executives to manage their price increases responsibly for the collective good by shaming them from his pulpit. Would such a bully pulpit offer an effective answer to balancing the biopharma budgets? Let us fast forward two generations from the early 1960s to assess what has changed. First, self-interest has gained primacy today, at the same time as bipartisan decorum and the sense of common good have declined. The ability to publicly shame an…

There’s a prevailing narrative that drug spending is a relatively minor 10% of overall healthcare spending in the US.  Like most narratives, this isn’t completely wrong, but it ignores a relatively big portion of spending on drugs: those drugs that are administered in a hospital or clinic and get billed under a patient’s medical benefit plan, rather than the drug benefit portion of their insurance.  Taking those hospital administered drugs, and other such direct distribution channels into account, the biopharma…

Many industries are being profoundly disrupted by IT. The survival of the publishing industry is in question as ad rates have plummeted in response to data and content transparency in the digital world. Digital technology has enabled pricing transparency that is fundamentally shifting spending patterns in travel, entertainment, transportation and many other industries. The biopharma industry so far has not felt too much heat—thanks to the complexity of its business. (Also see "Six Questions For McKinsey's Fox On Pharma's Digital…