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# Rethink Drug Payment Schemes: Gottlieb
- URL: https://www.fdaweb.com/rethink-drug-payment-schemes-gottlieb/
- Published: 2019-05-21T12:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-15T01:27:52.000Z
- Author: David McFarland
- Tags: Drugs, #legacy-id-D5144156

Former FDA commissioner **Scott Gottlieb** says the nation’s healthcare system needs to rethink how drugs and other therapies are paid for. “The drug debate is often focused on price,” he writes in a CNBC [commentary](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/20/commentary-new-drug-cures-risk-widening-income-gap-for-the-poor.html?ref=fdaweb.com). “But the real imperative turns on questions of access. Drugmakers have a compact with society. Consumers finance high-cost, high-risk science needed to deliver pharmaceutical innovation through the premium prices that are paid on the resulting successes. And Americans have long supported life science innovation. But that support, and the commitment to fund new drug treatments through the prices paid on the successful outcomes, comes with an implicit belief that a patient who needs access to critical therapy will have the opportunity to alter his or her destiny through innovation”

Gottlieb calls for new pricing arrangements that recognize, for example, that a therapy that can cure a disease in a single treatment is a public health solution rather than a unit of drug.

The commentary gives examples of innovative drug pricing.