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One feature of the political moment is that ideas that first appeared on the left (tariffs) are gaining support on the populist right. The latest example is a GOP plan in Florida to import prescription drugs from Canada, which is impractical, unsafe and unlikely to reduce prices at the pharmacy. The Florida Legislature has been moving on a plan pushed by Republican Governor Ron DeSantis that directs the state health agency to set up a prescription drug importation program. Other states like Colorado are pondering similar schemes, and Vermont is well along in setting one up. (4/15)

This is becoming the year of the health care “hot potato,” as various players in the market battle over who is the villain. The Senate Finance Committee kicked off 2019 with hearings aimed at getting to the root of soaring prescription drug prices and identifying bad actors. Suggested solutions ranged from banning price spreading to reforming rebate programs. Yet eluding the committee’s focus was the quality of the drugs on the market. Throughout my dozen years of service as a member of Congress, including a decade on the Ways and Means Committee that shares jurisdiction over prescription drugs, I generally favored the availability of generic pharmaceuticals in the marketplace. (J.D. Hayworth, 4/16)

A new Trump administration rule is forcing drug middlemen known as Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs) to direct some of the rebates they receive back to the consumers they're supposed to be representing has sparked a major lobbying brawl in the health-care industry. The specific Trump proposal is relatively narrow: it requires PBM drug copays to be based on what they pay wholesale for a drug, instead of its list price, thereby guaranteeing that consumers realize the gains instead of the middlemen. But the policy is one of the first significant blows against the increasingly powerful PBMs. (Benjamin Alli, 4/15)

Ask any small business owner and they’ll tell you: Their work is rewarding, but it is challenging. Sometimes Washington makes it worse. Take, for example, the Affordable Care Act. Just over nine years ago, the law was sold to small businesses on some rosy promises. “For the first time, small business owners and people who are being priced out of the insurance market will have the same kind of choice of private health insurance that members of Congress give to themselves,” said President Obama at the time. (Karen Kerrigan, 4/16)

Robin Feldman is a law professor at the University of California Hastings with a particular expertise in antitrust and patent issues. She is also one of those professors who are unusually good at explaining complex issues in terms laymen (like me!) can understand. Her 2012 book on how to fix the patent system, “Rethinking Patent Law,” is considered one of the more important contributions to the field in recent years. Feldman then turned her attention to the problem of skyrocketing drug prices. “Economically,” she says, “it doesn’t make sense. So I decided to look into it. It took years of research.” (Joe Nocera, 4/8)

Over the past year we’ve watched two troubling trends escalate. First, patients increasingly face — and their doctors struggle to treat — infections that do not respond to existing antibiotics. Second, major pharmaceutical companies are backing away from developing new antibiotics. Last July, Novartis became the third major pharmaceutical company in 2018 alone to announce that it would end antibiotic research and development. Other companies that haven’t eliminated antibiotic R&D have significantly reduced it.In short, just as the world needs new and novel antibiotics, the research needed to find them is shrinking in size and scope. (Allan Coukell and Helen Boucher, 4/10)