Price critiques set off alarms in drug industry . Group says top priority is value, not what the market will bear

The Boston Globe reports:

Dr. Steven D. Pearson, sporting spectacles, a neatly trimmed goatee, and a natty blue blazer, looks every bit the mild-mannered inhabitant of the academic medical world.

But he may become a serious threat to the drug industry and the prices they charge for new medicines.

Pearson, 55, is president of a little-known Boston nonprofit with an unassuming name: the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review, or ICER. It has launched a series of comprehensive reviews that set proposed “value-based” prices for costly new prescription drugs. In the process, it has set off alarms in a biopharma industry accustomed to charging whatever the market will bear.

A draft report by the institute, issued last week, says a new class of cholesterol-lowering injectables approved by US regulators this summer should cost 85 percent less than the $14,100 to $14,600 a year per patient being charged. The price tag would have to come down to $2,177 to hold overall health care spending within acceptable bounds, it suggested.

Competition is a great thing, that's why government enforced cartels don't like it.