This State Isn’t Waiting for Biden To Negotiate Drug Prices

As the federal government negotiates with drugmakers to lower the price of 10 expensive drugs for Medicare patients, impatient legislators in some states are trying to go even further. Leading the pack is Colorado, where a new Prescription Drug Affordability Review Board is set to recommend an “upper payment limit” for drugs it deems unaffordable.

In late February the board selected Enbrel, Amgen’s blockbuster drug for autoimmune conditions (list price $1,850 per week), as the first medication that would go through its process. Novartis’s Cosentyx and Johnson & Johnson’s Stelara (both treat autoimmune conditions) will undergo affordability reviews later this year.

Enbrel and Stelara are also on the list of drugs whose prices the federal government is negotiating — but only for Medicare patients. Prices may be published Sept. 1 — in time for President Biden to cheer the results in his reelection campaign. But they won’t take effect until 2026, while the drug industry pursues a raft of lawsuits to stop the initiative.

Colorado’s plan is, in many ways, both broader and more prescriptive than the feds’, covering all patients and potentially fixing an upper price limit rather than squabbling with the industry over an acceptable figure.

Colorado’s government said it anticipates similar litigation. A spokesperson for the state’s Division of Insurance, which oversees the program, declined to make anyone available for an int