Medicare drug price cuts to include Boehringer Ingelheim’s Jardiance

The White House announced Thursday agreements to lower the prices of 10 of the most-expensive and most-popular prescription drugs covered by Medicare — a group that includes Jardiance, a treatment for conditions such as diabetes that is made by Ridgefield-based Boehringer Ingelheim, which has filed a lawsuit over the process.

After months of negotiations, those 10 medications’ list prices — the cost before rebates or discounts are applied — will plunge between 38 percent and 79 percent, according to the White House. But the new process of directly negotiating prices for some Medicare-covered drugs, a framework that was created by the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which was signed into law by President Joe Biden in August 2022, remains unpopular with pharmaceutical companies such as Boehringer Ingelheim.

While Boehringer Ingelheim and the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, “share a common goal of ensuring medicines are affordable and available to patients, we believe that government price setting under the Inflation Reduction Act will do little to actually help patients at the pharmacy counter and will have unintended consequences that hinder bringing novel future innovative treatments to people who so desperately need them,” officials with the drug maker said in a written statement on Thursday.

The statement did not address how the announcement would affect the company’s lawsuit over components of the IRA that allow for direct price negotiations for Medicarecovered drugs. Boehringer Ingelheim has appealed a federal court ruling last month by a Connecticut judge who rejected the company’s complaint, which was filed in August 2023. The ruling followed decisions in the past few months against several other pharmaceutical firms that have challenged the IRA.

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