Courts in Maryland and Washington, D.C., have rejected lawsuits by two pharma giants against the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services' (CMS) drug price negotiation program, introduced by former President Joe Biden under the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).
On Monday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in Washington, D.C., ruled against Merck & Co., rejecting its claim that the price negotiations are unconstitutional because they violate the First and Fifth Amendments. The argument is one that has been made by multiple drugmakers pushing back against the program.
The ruling comes five days after a federal court in Maryland dismissed an AstraZeneca lawsuit, which alleged that the government grouped too many of its drugs together to reach a benchmark that made them eligible for the price reduction program.
The losses add to a series of defeats drugmakers have suffered in attempting to challenge the government’s price negotiation rules since they were introduced in 2022.
In May, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear cases brought by Johnson & Johnson, Bristol Myers Squibb, Novo Nordisk, Novartis, Boehringer Ingelheim and a previous lawsuit brought by AstraZeneca, after all the challenges had been rejected by lower courts.
