Bret Jackson Discusses Upcoming Challenges of Paying for Specialty Drugs, Therapeutic Advancements

A major upcoming challenge in healthcare will be determining how to pay for specialty drugs and medical advancements like cellular therapies, said Bret Jackson, president of the Economic Alliance for Michigan.

Transcript

There are a number of new policies and proposals coming from the Trump administration. Are there any specific ones that you are excited about or concerned about?

I guess we’re waiting to see what sticks, because as you said, there’s a number of different proposals that are being submitted and kind of thrown out into the ether to see what happens. I don’t know if any of them are going to become meaningful, and until they do it’s really hard to judge what type of impact they’ll have on the healthcare marketplace.

For the organizations you work with in Michigan, are there any particular new health issues they’re concerned about?

I think the trends that we’re seeing with specialty drugs, which are known problems, are the problems that are coming up and going to be the future issues that we have to deal with in healthcare. All of these cellular therapies and genomic testing and all of these wonderful advancements in healthcare also come at an extremely high cost, and we have to figure out how we’re going to manage that going forward.