Brady: We Can Lower Costs for Patients Without Sacrificing Cures

MARCH 22, 2022 

Warning against the Biden Administration’s decision to limit coverage for a new Alzheimer’s treatment, Republican Leader on the Ways and Means Committee Rep. Kevin Brady (R-TX) urged Democrats to work with Republicans to ensure greater access to new cures, at a Ways and Means Health Subcommittee Republican Meeting.

Duane Schulthess, CEO Vital Transformation, was invited as a witness in the Committee of Ways and Means at the U.S. House of Representatives.

The House of Representatives approved H.R. 3 in December 2019, but the bill died in the Senate, which was then controlled by Republicans and is now split 50-50. The legislation, which was reintroduced on April 22, 2021, by three House chairs is now being tacked on to an infrastructure package. Its most threatening feature is what’s called international reference pricing. That means linking the prices of hundreds of U.S. drugs to those of six other countries, where single-payer systems rule and prices are set by the government. If H.R. 3 is enacted, U.S. prices would fall sharply, and so would biopharmaceutical R&D.

The European Union's vaccination effort came under fire just as it was beginning to deliver. Heralded for months as the flagship of European solidarity during the coronavirus pandemic, the European Commission’s strategy of joint vaccine procurement is now being accused by national leaders of being too bureaucratic, too limiting to its members, too slow.

Duane Schulthess, managing Director of Vital Transformation, was invited as an expert by POLITICO to participate in “Health Care 2024,” a survey-driven series of online debates in which POLITICO will explore how the European Union can best tackle health policy. In this installment of Health Care 2024 POLITICO asks: Can the EU gain benefits from sharing health data without weakening privacy — and if so, how?

By Duane Schulthess It’s odd that a city like Brussels managed to carve itself out a niche as one of the major political centres of the world. The medieval site of a notoriously typhus infested bog, one of the main streets in downtown, ‘Rue du Marais’, literally means, “Street of the Swamp” and the name of the city itself comes from the old Flemish word Broekzele, which roughly translates to ‘settlement in the swamp.’ So, when one talks politically of draining the swamp, at least in Brussels, it carries a literal interpretation that is often distant from the current political climate in DC.