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Drug companies are falling over themselves with plans to halt or defer price increases to get on Donald Trump’s good side. They seem to believe his approval comes cheap. Pfizer Inc. started things off earlier this month by agreeing to roll back mid-year price hikes and delay them — for a few months. Similar efforts announced this week by Novartis AG and Merck & Co. arguably won’t be any more consequential. But Roche Holding AG takes the cake by promising to not raise prices for the rest of 2018, shortly after it hiked prices for the second time this year on its biggest drugs. (Max Nisen, 7/20)

At first glance, last week’s decision by Pfizer to postpone price hikes seemed like a victory in the fight to reduce the crushing costs of medications. President Donald Trump certainly saw it that way, declaring it was “great news for the American people!”Indeed, Pfizer’s plans and Trump’s talk of curbing drug prices are far more placebo than meaningful treatment — and patients will continue to feel the pain in their wallets. (7/21)

In May, our editorial board called on Gov. John Kasich and his administration to review its reliance on costly Medicaid prescription drug contracts with managed-care plans that in turn hire middle men to contract with drug stores. Those middle men, known as pharmacy benefit managers, then take another cut for themselves. The Columbus Dispatch has reported that West Virginia saved $38 million in the first year it canceled similar contracts and switched to a fee-for-service approach. Ohio's setup also creates transparency problems by masking additional profits PBMs might create for themselves, for instance, by pocketing discounts drug makers might pay for having their drugs listed as preferred, or by squeezing pharmacists on reimbursements. Currently, the PBMs don't reveal to Ohio taxpayers how much extra profit they make off the system. Excess profits would drive up what taxpayers have to pay to subsidize the whole arrangement. (7/25)

Donald Trump’s drug-price push is steering right into health megadeals. The Trump administration’s budget office was sent a proposal by the Health and Human Services Department late Wednesday that seems to target pharmacy benefit managers — the middlemen in the pricing process — as part of efforts to change the way drugs are paid for. In doing so, the measure stands to alter the math of two huge pending tie-ups in the industry: the $67.5 billion acquisition of insurer Aetna Inc. by PBM giant CVS Health Inc., and the $54 billion takeover of PBM Express Scripts Holding Co. by insurer Cigna Corp. (Max Nisen, 7/19)

A poster on the side of a bus stop in downtown Washington D.C. read: “Let 340B,” clearly a sign of an organized campaign asking Congress not to interfere with the gravy train for some hospital systems that this obscure provision has become. The safety net drug program, usually referred to as 340B for the section authorizing it in the Public Health Service Act, was created by Congress in 1992 to require pharmaceutical companies participating in Medicaid to provide their drugs at deeply discounted prices to hospitals and other facilities that serve a disproportionate number of indigent and uninsured patients. (Grace-Marie Turner, 7/19)

In a First Opinion piece on how blockchain technologies could affect health care and the life sciences, its landscape map included 48 projects covering areas like decentralized health records and data marketplaces. Just six months later, the map has tripled in size, covering nearly 150 projects that have raised more than $660 million in private and blockchain-funded (crypto) markets. (Andy Coravos and Noah Zimmerman, 7/25)