Drug companies have found a way to circumvent President Joe Biden’s price cap on inhalers: going green. New climate-friendly inhalers, which could come to market as early as next year, will cost Medicare and Medicaid billions of extra dollars and allow major pharmaceutical companies to raise their prices and, consequently, their profits, writes Ariel Wittenberg. Biden successfully lowered Medicare prices and capped out-of-pocket inhaler costs to $35 for millions of Americans with lung disease. But greening brand-name products will let drug companies bring them back under patent protection, effectively killing competition for at least a decade. The move could undermine work by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and the Biden administration to lower patients’ drug costs — even as Vice President Kamala Harris campaigns for president on those gains. When Ariel inquired, officials at AstraZeneca and GlaxoSmithKline, which produce some of the most widely used inhalers in the United States, declined to commit to maintaining the $35 out-of-pocket price cap on the new inhalers. The push to green inhalers is driven in part by a global climate treaty signed nearly a decade ago. The Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol encourages drug companies to redevelop inhalers without using planet-warming hydrofluorocarbons, a major driver of climate change. But if the revised inhalers come with new patents, that could prevent the Food and Drug Administration from approving generic versions. “We are talking about big-name products that are going to be largely immune from price negotiations,” said William Feldman, a pulmonologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston who studies drug patents and how they influence costs. The situation could be bad news for millions of Americans’ bottom lines. Inhalers are some of the most widely used medical devices and can be lifesaving drugs for the nearly 25 million adults and children who have asthma in the United States. Their emissions, however, are equivalent to driving half a million cars for a year, according to federal data. GSK estimates that some 49 percent of all its greenhouse gas emissions are related to patients using its inhalers.
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