Don’t give in to big pharma on drug pricing | Pharmaceuticals industry

While Eli Lilly’s chief executive may bemoan UK drug prices (the UK is the ‘worst country in Europe’ for drug prices, Mounjaro maker says September 24), the NHS should rejoice. The system set up to assess the cost-effectiveness of new medicines is respected around the world and succeeds in applying the principle that funding for a new product should not harm the NHS as a whole. This cost-effectiveness principle has led to widespread price reductions for the NHS, allowing the service as a whole to benefit.

The chief executive of Eli Lilly links the pharmaceutical industry’s recent suspension or cancellation of investment in the UK to drug prices in the UK, which are due to pharmaceutical companies’ desperation to pander to Donald Trump.

Plus, talk of raising Nice’s break-even point, or even indexing it, is a shame (NHS could pay 25% more for drugs under plan to end rows with drugmakers and Trump, October 8). The threshold is not a price that we should increase every year; it is a measure of opportunity cost. It measures the health improvements in the wider NHS that we miss when we invest more in a new service or medicine. If a new drug does not generate more ‘health’ than the one it replaces, the situation in the NHS as a whole is worse. The rate of travel does not change directly with inflation. Linking the two is absurd.
Simon Dixon
Former Professor of Health Economics, University of Sheffield