STAT+: Medicare quietly gave blockbuster AbbVie drug seven extra years before price negotiations, advocacy group asserts
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- Medicare enacted a little-noticed policy shift that caused a seven-year delay in selecting a costly AbbVie medicine for federal price negotiations, per a consumer advocacy group analysis.
- The advocacy group asserts the delay is likely to hurt taxpayers, framing the policy change as quietly benefiting a blockbuster drug.
- CMS was preparing a new round of drug-price talks with manufacturers when the policy change took effect.
- The price-negotiation process was created by the Inflation Reduction Act, signed into law in 2022 in response to rising prescription drug costs.
Why it matters: The Inflation Reduction Act's drug-price negotiation program — the federal government's most aggressive tool against high drug costs — just had a single agency policy decision stretch out taxpayer exposure on one expensive AbbVie medicine by seven years, per the advocacy group's analysis.
