Medicare’s innovation center may be the best avenue for lowering drug costs if provisions empowering government price negotiation don’t make it into a sweeping domestic spending package.
Democratic lawmakers are scrambling to reach a deal to get a long-debated drug pricing overhaul into the package after it was dropped in a White House framework. But analysts say that instead of trying to reach consensus within Congress, a more surefire path to lower prices would be to develop new Medicare models that tie reduced drug payments to improved patient outcomes.
“At this stage we’re probably going to be focused on what ...