Bad Week for Pharma in Court!
Big Pharma suffered two more courtroom defeats this week, delivering the 24th and 25th legal victories for Medicare negotiation and the patients who fought to make it law. On Wednesday, a unanimous Fifth Circuit panel rejected a challenge from PhRMA, the industry’s trade association and a central player in its years-long campaign to dismantle negotiation. Two days earlier, Merck — the first drugmaker to file a lawsuit after Medicare negotiation became law in 2022 — lost its challenge in federal court in D.C. The losses add to an increasingly decisive legal record: courts have repeatedly rejected the industry’s attempts to overturn Medicare negotiation, and the Supreme Court declined to hear six additional drugmaker challenges earlier this year. Big Pharma has spent years and millions of dollars trying to protect its monopoly pricing power in court, but patients and Medicare negotiation keep winning. — [Merck Brief, PhRMA Brief, The Hill, Fierce Pharma, Bloomberg Law, Endpoints News, Law360]
Potential Drugmaker Deals Coming Soon
The White House is expected to announce a new round of most-favored-nation agreements with midsized biotech companies on Monday. According to reporting, participating drugmakers would offer discounts to state Medicaid programs based on prices paid abroad, in exchange for exemptions from forthcoming Medicare drug pricing models and, in some cases, potential tariff relief. Lower prices are welcome, but most of these discounts would flow to Medicaid programs that already receive substantial mandatory discounts, and participation would be optional for states — raising questions about how much additional savings the agreements will deliver. It’s also unclear whether the savings generated by these agreements will outweigh any savings forgone by exempting participating drugs from the forthcoming Medicare pricing models. Like other administration drug initiatives, these agreements could provide meaningful savings in some circumstances, but enforcement mechanisms are unclear and even in a best case scenario, they fall short of the transparent, system-wide reforms needed to bring down U.S. drug prices for patients across the market. — [Bloomberg, POLITICO]
ICYMI: A growing number of U.S. employers are planning to drop coverage of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs in 2027 as healthcare costs continue to rise. The share of employers covering GLP-1s for obesity fell from 72% in 2025 to 60% in 2026, while 14% said they already have or plan to eliminate coverage in 2027. As the high price of these medicines puts increasing pressure on employer health plans — the most common way that Americans have medical insurance — patients risk losing access to treatments that can significantly improve their health. — [Reuters]