BUILDING ON A STRONG FOUNDATION: UPDATED STRATEGIC PLAN

What, then, should Congress do? First, it should seek to make drug markets as efficient and competitive as possible. It’s under those conditions that unit costs will be most affordable. One way to ensure that is by continuing to support the stepped-up Food and Drug Administration (FDA) drug-approval process, which has accelerated in recent years. As new brand-name drugs are allowed to compete with rival drugs—and new generic versions of existing drugs enter the market—prices will inevitably fall.

Second, policymakers should advocate adopting global measurements of value, rather than only cost. Take the drug that eliminated hepatitis C virus. At first, governments and private insurance payers resisted adopting it because of its relatively high unit cost. In the short run, that preserved budgets and kept prescription-drug inflation lower. But in the long run, we lost thousands of lives and added hundreds of billions of dollars to healthcare costs. Making a drug’s value the priority in real-world settings—notwithstanding its initially high costs—will aid innovation for other treatments, such as cancer and Alzheimer’s, and improve the return on the dollars we do spend.

The COVID vaccination process was instructive. To make sure everyone had access, the federal government bought the vaccines en masse. The FDA sped its approvals. And the result was widespread uptake and dramatically reduced mortality rates. The effect of reimbursing care on the basis of value rather than price and preserving access to that care was especially favorable.

The right combination of pharmaceutical polices will create incentives for innovation and allow market-based competition to defuse price inflation. Advocating price controls—and misreading inflation numbers for political gain—will only take us in the wrong direction.

Dana Goldman and Erin Trish are co-directors of the USC Schaeffer Center for Health Policy & Economics and faculty members at the School of Pharmacy. Goldman is also dean of the USC Price School of Public Policy. This op-ed ran in the July 7 issue of the Wall Street Journal.

Dana Goldman

Erin Trish

Building on a Strong Foundation

School Unveils Updated Strategic Plan to Transform the Face of Pharmacy Over the past five years, the School of Pharmacy community implemented an ambitious and wide-ranging strategic plan that strengthened the school’s capacity to fulfill the growing needs of the field and bolster its role spanning the entire pharmaceutical spectrum—from laboratory discovery to clinical care and from health policy and economics to regulatory science. Now, the school has updated the plan for 2023–2027 to further enhance its ongoing efforts to transform the face of pharmacy.

While many of the overarching goals and strategies remain consistent with the previous plan, the updated version leverages and expands on the advances and learnings of the past five years. It also strengths the school’s commitment to wellness and to diversity, equity and inclusion.

Read the full plan at pharmacyschool.usc.edu/strategicplan.