Senate Finance Committee plots ways to tweak Medicare to reduce sterile injectable shortages

The top De­mo­c­rat and Re­pub­li­can in the Sen­ate Fi­nance Com­mit­tee out­lined ways in which new leg­is­la­tion could help com­bat decades­long short­ages of cheap, gener­ic ster­ile in­jecta­bles and oth­er es­sen­tial med­i­cines.

Specif­i­cal­ly, a co-au­thored white pa­per, pub­lished Thurs­day, pledges to cre­ate a new pay­ment bench­mark for gener­ic ster­ile in­jecta­bles, in­clud­ing po­ten­tial “lump-sum pay­ments or oth­er mech­a­nisms” for those help­ing to pre­vent and mit­i­gate short­ages. But the com­mit­tee is grap­pling with how cer­tain de­sign fea­tures of the new bench­mark for gener­ic in­jecta­bles will look, in­clud­ing how it “would avoid ex­ac­er­bat­ing race to-the-bot­tom pric­ing” while pro­mot­ing com­pe­ti­tion.

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