President Trumps meeting Tuesday with pharmaceutical executives was a theatrical display of chumminess in which all the parties seemed to share deep regret over high and soaring drug prices.
It also was a one-stop shop of misconceptions and misinformation about the causes of high drug prices, and therefore a mishmash of solutions, most of which are a lot more complicated than Trump thinks, some of which wont work, and some of which are disguised handouts to the drug industry.
Trump addressed the cost of bringing a new drug to market thusly:
I read where it costs sometimes $2.5 billion on average, actually to come up with a new product.
Fifteen years, $2.5 billion to come up with a product where theres not even a safety problem. So its crazy.
Leaving aside the fact that a major part of R&D is aimed at determining whether theres a safety problem, Trump didnt say where he got that figure. But we know: He got it from the pharmaceutical industry, via the Tufts University Center for the Study of Drug Development, which is heavily funded by the industry itself.
But there are several issues with these studies that have been raised by critics of the industry. One is that the raw data are confidential. The latest study is based on the R&D costs of 106 drugs made by 10 multinational companies but, in common with the previous studies, neither the drugs whose costs are analyzed nor the companies in the sample are revealed. The paper says only that five were among the top 10 in global sales, seven are in the top 25 and three are outside the top 25.
Obviously, this makes any assessment of the accuracy of the Tufts estimate impossible. A study that doesn't reveal what it measured or provide a way for outsiders to reproduce its findings is hopelessly flawed, and must be judged useless as the basis for any policymaking.
