In response to rising prices for medicines, public and private payers increasingly rely on assessments of cost-effectiveness to justify coverage. But a new examination finds that such studies sponsored by drug companies were often biased in favor of setting higher prices for their medicines.
Specifically, one-third of the cost-effectiveness analyses that were conducted by drugmakers reached more favorable conclusions than independently conducted analyses. And industry-sponsored analyses were twice as likely to report that a medicine was cost effective when relying on a commonly used metric to gauge the value of a medication, according to the study published in The BMJ.