IRA-negotiated prices went into effect for an initial 15 drugs at the beginning of the year, setting lower Medicare prices for drugs like Bristol Myers Squibb’s Eliquis, AstraZeneca’s Farxiga and Novo Nordisk’s insulin product NovoLog.
With large pharma companies now confronting a two-pronged assault on U.S. drug prices, Novo has received a lift on its petition for the Supreme Court hear its challenge to the Medicare price negotiation measures outlined in the Inflation Reduction Act.On Wednesday, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce filed an amicus brief calling on the Supreme Court to review a lower court decision that previously rejected Novo’s constitutional challenge of the IRA drug pricing provisions.As with other challenges to the IRA—many of them brought by the companies subject to price negotiations themselves—the Chamber argued that the negotiations baked into the law are “illusory,” contending that the statute employs “crippling penalties and other tools to coerce manufacturers to sell their property to third parties at below-market prices.”IRA-negotiated prices went into effect for an initial 15 drugs at the beginning of the year, setting lower Medicare prices for drugs like Bristol Myers Squibb’s Eliquis, AstraZeneca’s Farxiga and Novo Nordisk’s insulin product NovoLog.The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services unveiled the second batch of drugs up for negotiations a year ago and did so for another 15 just this week. Notably, Novo Nordisk’s lucrative GLP-1s for diabetes and obesity, Ozempic and Wegovy, were named among the second tranche of negotiated prices on Medicare.Next year, Ozempic’s Medicare price will come down to $274 per month versus a previous list price of $959, while Medicare will pay $385 per month for higher doses of Wegovy, according to a CMS document published (PDF) last fall. In making the case for the Supreme Court to hear Novo’s petition, lawyers for the Chamber of Commerce argued that the pricing provisions in the IRA risk doing “irremediable damage to investment in research and development in the U.S. pharmaceutical sector.”The Chamber took a similar tack to other industry IRA challenges, contending that the drug pricing provisions included in the bill are “deeply flawed on several constitutional grounds.” Under the IRA’s language, companies that refuse to comply with the price negotiation process face an increasing excise tax, or they could choose to withdraw all of their drugs from Medicare and Medicaid coverage. Drugmakers could also be subject to a civil monetary penalty if they refuse to offer select drugs at the new, negotiated prices.In urging the Supreme Court to hear Novo’s challenge, the Chamber argued that IRA could have repercussions beyond just one industry, warning that the prior rejection of Novo’s claims “gives the Government a blueprint for forcing others to give up their constitutional rights, exempt from judicial review.”The pharmaceutical industry has fought the IRA’s drug pricing provisions fiercely in recent years, with a common refrain being that the drug price negotiations floated are more akin to price controls, given the penalties for noncompliance.Still, the myriad legal challenges introduced by the industry have so far failed to meaningfully resist the IRA provisions.Novartis, last Friday became the sixth drugmaker to file its IRA challenge with the Supreme Court, Endpoints News reported earlier this week.Back in September, AstraZeneca also petitioned the U.S. high court to hear its challenge. In May of last year, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals denied AZ’s due process claim in the matter.As for the Novo loss that informed the Danish drugmaker’s Supreme Court bid, U.S. District Judge Zahid Quraishi in 2024 struck down Novo’s arguments against the IRA price negotiations in a New Jersey federal court. As in his decision in a prior Bristol Myers IRA challenge, Quraishi stated that drugmakers do, in fact, have a choice as to whether they sell their drugs through Medicare, regardless of the ramifications for their businesses.At the time, a Novo spokesperson told Fierce that the company would “pursue an immediate appeal.”Aside from the IRA pricing provisions, which became law under the Biden administration, the pharmaceutical industry is also facing new pricing pressure during President Donald Trump’s second term.This has come in the form of the president’s “most-favored-nation” strategy, which broadly seeks to align the costs paid for medicines in the U.S. with those in other developed nations. So far, AbbVie, Amgen, AstraZeneca, Boehringer Ingelheim, Bristol Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly, Merck KGaA’s EMD Serono, Roche’s Genentech, Gilead Sciences, GSK, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Novartis, Novo Nordisk, Pfizer and Sanofi have all struck drug pricing deals with the White House, although the details on those arrangements have been blurry.The MFN deals also benefits drugmakers by conferring immunity to Trump’s pharmaceutical tariff threats, which the president has wielded in a bid to drive more production investments to the U.S.