Revised June 2024
Originally approved June 2018
The American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) believes that rising drug prices increasingly threaten the health and financial well-being of the patients served by its members. In addition, the high cost of pharmaceutical agents, particularly compared to other countries, is a factor that limits patient access to medications because of increasing undue financial and administrative costs and burdens. Furthermore, ACEP believes:
- Value-based pharmaceutical pricing is a promising strategy to ensure that the benefits of a given drug are commensurate with the price charged.
- Medicare's capabilities to negotiate with pharmaceutical manufacturers the prices of medications, especially high expenditure drugs without generic or biosimilar competition, should be further expanded.
- Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs) have contributed to rising pharmaceutical prices which reduce access to necessary medications. There should be transparency into how PBMs and their financial relationships impact the cost of medications to the patient.
- Government and other regulatory entities should maximize access to life-saving medications, such as insulin and intramuscular epinephrine, through strategies such as price caps.
- Electronic health record vendors and health systems should support the integration of drug price information that physicians can access at the point-of-care, when available. This should include pricing for both hospital-administered and prescribed medications and should provide decision-support tools to suggest equally effective alternatives when quality evidence exists to inform such decisions.
