By: Marvell Adams Jr. | CEO | Caregiver Action Network

Originally Posted on TheWellNews.com

Today, 63 million Americans — one in four adults — provide care to a loved one living with age-related decline, disability or serious illness like cancer or heart disease. For these caregivers, reliable access to innovative medicines often marks the line between stability and crisis.

Unfortunately, that access is now threatened by Washington’s latest drug pricing proposal: the so-called “Most Favored Nation” model.

Supporters bill MFN as a way to cut costs. In reality, it would import Europe’s system of government-set prices, and with it the predictable consequences: fewer available treatments, longer waits and stalled medical innovation. Patient care would suffer, and caregivers would be left to shoulder even more.

MFN may seem appealing on the surface: tie the price of certain medicines here to the lowest prices paid in other developed countries. If they pay less, why shouldn’t we?

The answer lies in how those “savings” abroad are achieved. European governments keep costs artificially low by placing restrictions on which medicines patients can access and how long they must wait after approval.

Families overseas live the consequences daily. While Americans can access roughly three-quarters of new medicines launched worldwide, patients in price-controlled systems have access to fewer than half. And when treatments do arrive, they can be too late. In Europe, patients often wait more than a year for new therapies that patients in the United States can get within months or even weeks.

MFN risks importing those same trade-offs here — and for caregivers, the impact would be crushing. Every denial or delay would shift the burden back onto families. Caregivers would be forced to rely on less effective options that don’t meet their loved ones’ needs. That means more complications, more doctor visits to juggle, and even longer hours — caregivers already provide 27 hours of care weekly, on average.

And the damage would extend far beyond today’s medicines. Developing a new therapy often takes more than a decade and billions of dollars. The United States anchors the global system because our market values and sustains the investment that medical innovation requires.

If MFN links U.S. prices to the artificially low levels paid abroad, it will drastically slash the resources companies use to fund research. That means far fewer breakthroughs in the years ahead — the very advancements caregivers are counting on.

Indeed, a University of Chicago analysis projected that MFN-style policies could lead to a 48% drop in private research spending and keep approximately 500 treatments from reaching patients in need.

For caregivers, that long-term impact is devastating. If fewer medicines are ever developed, it means years of watching loved ones struggle with conditions that might otherwise have been treated more effectively. It means more hope deferred because promising innovation stalled and more emotional strain — nearly two-thirds of caregivers already report high levels of stress.

That’s the danger of MFN, which is gaining traction just as we mark National Family Caregivers Month. This year’s theme, “Plug-in to Care,” calls on all of us to connect caregivers with the right resources, at the right time, in the right way. That includes cutting through the noise of drug-pricing debates to understand what the latest proposals would actually mean for those of us providing care every day.

Put plainly: MFN is a false promise. It dangles the idea of lower costs while delivering only fewer choices, longer waits and diminished hope for the future.

There are far better approaches to pursue.

One of the key drivers of inflated prices in the United States is pharmacy benefit managers — the middlemen who decide which medicines make it onto insurance formularies and what patients ultimately pay. PBMs negotiate rebates with manufacturers that are supposed to reduce costs, but because the arrangements are secret, patients rarely see the benefit.

In fact, PBMs profit more from bigger rebates, which gives them an incentive to favor higher-priced drugs over lower-cost alternatives. A recent Federal Trade Commission investigation found that the three largest PBMs alone generated more than $7 billion in just five years through these opaque, perverse practices.

The fix is clear: require transparency in rebate negotiations and ensure savings are passed directly to patients. Doing so would deliver immediate relief at the pharmacy counter for patients and caregivers who are stretched thin.

This month, as the nation honors caregivers, policymakers should do the same — by rejecting MFN and choosing reforms that ease, not increase, the burden on families.