Brainstorm Health: Xarelto TV Ads, Paid for Staying in Bed, Bristol Myers Celgene Deal

Brainstorm Health Daily: March 29, 2019

Happy Friday, readers!

I’m running around prepping for our upcoming Brainstorm Health conference (hey, I’ve mentioned that’s happening next week and is going to be awesome, right?) so it’ll have to be a short one this beautiful Friday afternoon.

But here’s something worth noting--Johnson & Johnson is reportedly getting ahead of the regulatory curve to become the first drug company in the U.S. to spell out a treatment’s price in direct-to-consumer television ads, for the blood thinner . The Trump administration has been preparing rules along these lines to mandate the disclosures in pharma ads.

J&J is also addressing one of the main criticisms of the proposed rules--that list prices are often substantially different from what patients actually pay for their medicine. So the company will be including brand name blood thinner Xarelto’s nearly $450 list price, alongside the net prices the company says three in four consumers pay (i.e., somewhere between nothing and $47).

The idea here is to increase transparency (a woefully missing element in American health care). But the natural followup question here is: How much will this actually move the needle on patients’ medical costs, or the high costs of drugs in general? DTC ads, by definition, put the onus on the consumer, essentially making them messengers who then need to bring up treatment choices with their doctors. It’s an open question whether such an indirect series of events can eventually bend the cost curve.

Read on for the day’s news, and have a wonderful weekend.