A Path to Fair Drug Pricing
- Jul 31, 2025
- 2 min read
Teaser/Abstract
"During the Kaiser Permanente Institute for Health Policy forum, experts discussed emerging solutions to address policies and tactics that currently enable high drug prices."
Source: Kaiser Permanente Institute for Health Policy, "A Path to Fair Drug Pricing: Examining Competition, Value, and Access." In-person forum, Washington, DC, July 15, 2025. Video published July 31, 2025. Duration of full segment: not confirmed. Participants in this panel segment include Dr. Jerry Avorn, MD, and other forum speakers.
This video captures one panel segment from a full-day Kaiser Permanente Institute for Health Policy forum examining the structural forces behind high prescription drug prices in the United States. The specific segment — "What Influences Drug Prescribing and Utilization" — addresses the question of how physicians make drug choices and what forces, beyond clinical evidence, shape those decisions.
The forum as a whole addressed four major topic areas: anticompetitive tactics used by pharmaceutical manufacturers to extend market exclusivity; drug value and the evidence standards used to assess it; cell and gene therapies and GLP-1 drugs as current policy challenges; and federal policy discussions underway to lower drug prices.
The prescribing-and-utilization panel sits at the intersection of Dr. Avorn's foundational career work and the forum's broader policy focus. His decades of research have documented that physician prescribing is shaped not only by clinical evidence but by pharmaceutical sales detailing, direct-to-consumer advertising, journal advertising, industry-sponsored continuing medical education, and financial relationships between manufacturers and prescribers — all operating simultaneously with and often in competition with the best available evidence. His academic detailing model was developed precisely as a non-commercial counterweight to these commercial influences.
Other speakers at the full forum included Dr. Adriane Fugh-Berman (Director of PharmedOut, Georgetown University Medical Center), Leigh Purvis (AARP Public Policy Institute), Marta Wosinska (Brookings Institution), Tahir Amin (CEO, Initiative for Medicines, Access & Knowledge), Lauren Aronson (Campaign for Sustainable Drug Pricing), Conor Sheehey (former Senior Health Counsel, US Senate Finance Committee), Polly Webster (Senior Health Counsel, US Senate Finance Committee), and Anthony Barrueta (Senior Vice President, Government Relations, Kaiser Permanente).