The US prescription drug business is a $500 billion industry whose rising prices carry profound consequences for patients, caregivers, employers and taxpayers across the nation. In the United States, average prices of leading brand-name drugs are two to four times higher than prices charged in other wealthy countries, raising questions as to what Americans are getting for the extra expense. On the other hand, healthy industry returns have arguably fueled life-saving innovation. With the advent of ever more targeted and powerful treatments, including cell- and gene-based therapies with multi-million-dollar price tags, the need for sensible drug pricing policies will only intensify. The Right Price sheds light on the controversial topic of drug pricing by providing an accessible guide to pharmaceutical markets and analytic techniques used to measure the value of drug therapies. It illustrates the need for value-based pricing through real-life stories of patients and their experiences with the drug industry and explains why simple solutions like price controls and the importation of cheaper drugs from other countries are problematic. This volume describes how researchers and policy makers have pursued drug valuation efforts in the past, and lays out a series of recommendations, based on years of shared author experience serving on national drug policy platforms, for how to further improve pharmaceutical value assessment in the United States. With unique industry insights and clear narrative, The Right Price unveils why the pricing of drugs continues to be so challenging and how public and private officials can create more informed policies to achieve the right balance between drug pricing and value.

A COMPLETE UPDATE AND REVISION OF THE CLASSIC TEXT "At last, a manual of operations for comparing the cost-effectiveness of a preventive service with a treatment intervention." -American Journal of Preventive Medicine Twenty years after the first edition of COST-EFFECTIVENESS IN HEALTH AND MEDICINE established the practical benchmark for cost-effectiveness analysis, this completely revised edition of the classic text provides an essential resource to a new generation of practitioners, students, researchers, and policymakers. Produced by the Second Panel on Cost-Effectiveness in Health and Medicine-a team of 13 experts from fields including decision science, economics, ethics, psychology, and medicine-this new edition is a comprehensive guide to the use of cost-effectiveness analysis as an evaluative tool at the institutional and policy levels. As health care systems face increasing pressure to derive maximum value from expenditures, the guidelines in this new text represent not just the best information available, but a vital guide to health care decision-making in a challenging new era. Completely revised and enriched with examples and expanded coverage, this second edition of COST-EFFECTIVENESS IN HEALTH AND MEDICINE builds on its predecessor's excellence, offering required reading for both analysts and decision makers.