Nearly two years ago, Vermont became the first state in the country to adopt a law requiring drug makers to justify price hikes for medicines. The move was greeted with cautious enthusiasm by consumer advocates and lawmakers who hoped the effort might be the first step toward forcing the pharmaceutical industry to constrain its pricing.
But the latest progress report has dashed those hopes and state lawmakers are working on a fix.
“The results have been very disappointing,” William Lippert, who chairs the House Committee on Health Care, told us. “We took a first step toward transparency, but it wasn’t substantial enough to give us anything of true value. The thing that’s useful is that it identified some drugs and increases in their prices, but it’s only 10 drugs out of hundreds and hundreds.”
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