Placing value, price on new drugs: the challenge facing new UK policy, say Hopkins bioethicists

The USA should pay close attention to how the UK carries out plans to assess a new drug's worth using factors that go beyond clinical and cost effectiveness, according to researchers at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics.

In a commentary in the April 7 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, the bioethicists detail and discuss a new, "value-based pricing" policy proposed by the British government. Up to now, companies have been able to price their drugs freely (The Pharma Letters passim). But if the new policy is implemented, the UK will start negotiating drug prices.

The authors point out that key to the policy is the requirement that Britain's national health care system factors in some difficult-to-measure criteria, as well as more conventional ones, when deciding how much to pay for a new drug.