Price Controls And Global Pharmaceutical Progress

This Perspective reviews critically the work on price control impacts by Darius Lakdawalla and colleagues. It argues that the innovation elasticity of 3.0 emphasized by the authors is too high, exaggerating the long-run costs of price controls. It argues, too, that the drugs chosen for the authors' analysis are neither the most therapeutically innovative candidates nor those whose development is most likely to be discouraged by price controls. [ Health Affairs 28, no. 1 (2009): w161-w164 (published online 16 December 2008; 10.1377/hlthaff.28.1.w161)]