The U.S. Federal Trade Commission's decision on Friday to allow Amgen's takeover of Horizon Therapeutics was the latest setback to its stated goal of stricter antitrust enforcement, and instead paved the way for Amgen to gain drugs not subject to new price negotiations and possibly lower the company's tax burden. The move signals the FTC's uncertainty that a court would support its novel theory of future competition being disadvantaged by Amgen's "bundling" of drugs in negotiations with insurers. "I think there is some skittishness on whether to pursue this and develop new case law," said Abiel Garcia, a partner at Kesselman, Brantly & Stockinger and a former deputy attorney general in California's antitrust department.
like i m not doing that. yeah. and i think i made myself very clear. yeah, you certainly have on that front. president biden announced today the first ten drugs that are going to be subject to price negotiations between medicare and pharmaceutical companies, obviously a big step. if you were in the oval office, would you keep or remove the ability for medicare to negotiate lower prescription drug prices? what i would do, kaitlan, is take an entirely different approach to the problem. the real problem in the cost of prescription drugs are these pharmacy benefit managers, the middlemen that are taking 60% and 70% of the rebates that the pharmaceutical companies intend for the customers and pocketing themselves, making tens of billions of dollars a year. how about we start there, with the middlemen who provide absolutely no value to the consumer and little or no value to the pharmaceutical companies? how about we start there and then we work and see whether we need to have further n
on them. the only big opposition to it was from big pharma, which wanted to keep prices as high as possible. and their dog at opposition, over decades, is why this really popular, sensible proposal, was blocked. yet, today, that air is over. president biden announcing, in a program that is part of the inflation reduction act, the names of the first ten drugs that will be subject to price negotiations with medicare. eric tanden serves a domestic policy adviser, and she joins me now. it s great to have, you have been a democratic policy circles for a while and i ve been around this issue. so, there is something almost surreal about seeing that event today. this is a thing that is happening. yeah, i feel a little like i was aging with the videos. i worked on some of those campaigns over many years where we had leader after leader advocate for drugs being negotiate by medicare, very common sense proposal, but i m really proud that joe biden and
Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire is meeting France's top supermarkets and their suppliers on Wednesday and Thursday to try to persuade them to accelerate price cuts as shoppers struggle with the rising cost of food and other staples. Le Maire said in June he had secured a pledge from 75 top food companies to cut prices on hundreds of products from July to reflect lower raw material costs. In July, food prices in France were 12.7% higher than a year earlier, compared with a 13.7% increase in June.