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How’s this for a great deal? The United States government funded research and development of a new vaccine against Zika. But the Army, which paid a French pharmaceutical manufacturer for its development, is planning to grant exclusive rights to the vaccine to the manufacturer, Sanofi Pasteur, along with paying Sanofi up to $173 million. (Fran Quigley, 7/18)

The Food and Drug Administration was established to ensure the safety of food and medicines sold in the United States. That original charter seems to be ignored by the advocates of drug importation, who brush aside legitimate safety concerns to advance a political agenda. (Jim Greenwood, 7/14)

Pharmaceutical treatments and medical devices often have varying effectiveness depending on the indication for which they’re used: in oncology, for instance, response to a treatment varies with the type of tumor and stage of disease. The advent and proliferation of precision medicine in which biomarkers — whether genomic, proteomic, or structural — identify patients likely to receive greater treatment benefits only increase the range of variability in the effectiveness of the same product. (Amitabh Chandra and Craig Garthwaite, 7/13)

We've come a long way from President Donald Trump telling the pharmaceutical industry it was getting away with murder. His administration's Center for Medicaid and Medicaid Services (CMS) on Thursday proposed deep cuts to reimbursement rates for the 340B drug-discount program, which mandates big price cuts for "safety-net" hospitals that treat a lot of poor patients. (Max Nisen, 7/14)

President Trump likes to boast that he mastered the “art of the deal.” But one option his administration is considering to encourage lower drug prices, which surfaced in a recent draft executive order, may not be much of a deal for consumers. The concept has a clunky name — value-based pricing — but it’s fairly simple. One increasingly popular version works like this: A drug maker refunds some money to an insurer if its medicine fails to improve patient health or prevent a costly incident, such as a heart attack. (Ed Silverman, 7/17)

Why, in the early 21st century, are so many drugs that were cheaply available in the 20th century becoming prohibitively expensive? The past few years have seen a series of dramatic price hikes on essential off-patent medications, from albendazole to albuterol, digoxin to naloxone, Daraprim to EpiPen. In the storm of allegations and indignation that has followed each of these revelations, one explanation has remained consistent. To paraphrase Senators Susan Collins (R-ME) and Claire McCaskill (D-MO), who were the chair and the ranking member of the Senate Special Committee on Aging, firms that corner the market on off-patent medications and raise prices wildly often do so simply because they can. When the committee issued a 130-page report last December documenting the parallel strategies used by firms to engage in monopolistic price gouging on older essential drugs, the senators pointed out that these actions, though arguably unethical, have so far not been found to be illegal. (Jeremy A. Greene and William V. Padula,, 7/13)