Some Questions About the Relevance of Economic Justifications for Pricing Prescription Pharmaceuticals
Panel
Panel 4: Drug Cost and Access II
Moderator
Gordian Hasselblatt, Partner, CMS Hasche Sigle
Description
When goods or services are scarce, they need to be allocated among those who want them. In the perfect version of economics, one function prices serve is to ration goods and services, helping maximizing welfare by sending them to the people who value them most highly. In the perfect version of prescription drugs in medicine, that function becomes unnecessary. Professional expertise maximizes patient welfare with respect to those drugs by determining exactly who should receive them, based on the balance of the patients’ medical needs for the drug and their risks from them. That does not mean that prices are irrelevant in prescription drug markets, but it may be an insight of some value.
Location
Pacific McGeorge School of Law, Lecture Hall, 3200 Fifth Ave., Sacramento, CA
Some Questions About the Relevance of Economic Justifications for Pricing Prescription Pharmaceuticals
Pacific McGeorge School of Law, Lecture Hall, 3200 Fifth Ave., Sacramento, CA
When goods or services are scarce, they need to be allocated among those who want them. In the perfect version of economics, one function prices serve is to ration goods and services, helping maximizing welfare by sending them to the people who value them most highly. In the perfect version of prescription drugs in medicine, that function becomes unnecessary. Professional expertise maximizes patient welfare with respect to those drugs by determining exactly who should receive them, based on the balance of the patients’ medical needs for the drug and their risks from them. That does not mean that prices are irrelevant in prescription drug markets, but it may be an insight of some value.
Speaker Bio
Henry T. (Hank) Greely is the Deane F. and Kate Edelman Johnson Professor of Law and Professor, by courtesy, of Genetics at Stanford University. He specializes in ethical, legal, and social issues arising from advances in the biosciences, particularly from genetics, neuroscience, and human stem cell research. He is President of the International Neuroethics Society; directs the Stanford Center for Law and the Biosciences and the Stanford Program on Neuroscience in Society; chairs the California Advisory Committee on Human Stem Cell Research; and serves on the Neuroscience Forum of the National Academy of Medicine; the Committee on Science, Technology, and Law of the National Academy of Sciences; and the NIH BRAIN Initiative’s Multi-Council Working Group, whose Neuroethics Division he co-chairs. His book, The End of Sex and the Future of Human Reproduction, was published in May 2016.
Professor Greely graduated from Stanford in 1974 and from Yale Law School in 1977. He served as a law clerk for Judge John Minor Wisdom on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and for Justice Potter Stewart of the United States Supreme Court. After working during the Carter Administration in the Departments of Defense and Energy, he entered private law practice in Los Angeles in 1981. He joined the Stanford faculty in 1985.