PDABs Policy Center

The Community Access National Network (CANN) Prescription Drug Advisory Board Response Project for People Living with HIV is designed to provide a national, state-by-state, patient-facing resource on policies, programs, activities, and news on recent state-level efforts, including Prescription Drug Advisory Boards (PDABs), to set drug prices and reimbursement rates, and could affect providers, patients, and access to care and medication. While various public and private evaluative actors already engage in negotiating medication list-prices and reimbursement rates, PDABs pose the potential to undermine determinative factors, such as treatment guidelines and efficacy and tolerability as demonstrated in non-inferiority studies, in favor of an arbitrary financial factor. Most notably, the financial factor PDABs seek to determine do not necessarily have a direct relationship with patient out-of-pocket costs. As such there is no sufficient evidence to support the notion that reduction in list-prices or reimbursement rates benefit patients. To the contrary, due to various rebate and public health funding schemes which may be dependent on revenues generated from these rebate models, arbitrary price-setting policies risk negatively impacting patient access to care and necessarily disrupt the provider-patient relationship.