ROI NJ: State of the Union should put patients first — not price controls that threaten innovation

By Jeanette Hoffman, Patients Come First New Jersey’s Executive Director

In his State of the Union address, the President spoke about the urgent need to lower prescription drug costs for American families, a goal everyone shares. Here in New Jersey, hundreds of thousands of patients rely on life-saving and life-changing medications every day. Affordability matters deeply to them.

But how we lower costs matters just as much as the goal itself.

Proposals centered on government price-setting or so-called “price controls” may sound appealing in a speech, but they carry serious real-world consequences. History and economic evidence show that blunt price controls undermine the very engine that delivers new cures: biomedical research and innovation. When policymakers reduce the returns that support high-risk research, fewer breakthrough therapies reach patients, especially for complex conditions like cancer, rare diseases, and neurodegenerative disorders.

Simply put, New Jersey patients cannot afford policies that trade today’s headlines for tomorrow’s lost cures.

The reality is that many patients already struggle with out-of-pocket costs not because medicines lack value, but because the system that determines what they pay at the pharmacy counter is deeply distorted. Pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) and opaque middlemen practices often mean that discounts negotiated in the supply chain never reach the patients for whom they were intended. Instead, patients with chronic illnesses frequently pay coinsurance based on a drug’s list price, even when insurers and PBMs receive substantial rebates behind the scenes.

That is why meaningful PBM reform offers a far more patient-centered path to lower drug costs. Policymakers should ensure that negotiated discounts are passed through to patients at the point of sale, end spread pricing practices that inflate costs in public programs, and increase transparency so employers and taxpayers know exactly where their healthcare dollars go. These reforms target the real drivers of unaffordable, out-of-pocket costs without jeopardizing future innovation.

Similarly, the federal 340B drug discount program, which was created with the laudable goal of supporting safety-net providers, has expanded far beyond its original intent and now operates with limited transparency and accountability. While hospitals and large health systems can acquire medicines at steep discounts, there is no consistent requirement that those savings be shared with the low-income patients the program was designed to help. Reforming 340B to restore its patient focus and ensure benefits reach vulnerable communities would directly improve affordability without undermining medical progress.

Finally, America leads the world in biomedical innovation because it has maintained a policy environment that rewards discovery and supports investment in high-risk science. And many of the leading biomedical research companies and groundbreaking scientists are located right here in the Garden State. That leadership has produced treatments that transformed HIV from a death sentence into a chronic condition, turned many cancers into survivable diseases, and delivered gene therapies that correct disease at its source. Weakening that innovation ecosystem through government price-setting would ultimately hurt our most vulnerable patients and threaten the future generation of cures.

Read the full op-ed in ROI NJ here.