Manatt’s Ian Spatz, a senior advisor with Manatt Health, spoke with Inside Health Policy on the Trump administration’s newly announced two-track plan to allow drug importation.
According to Inside Health Policy, the new importation plan offers a pathway for states, wholesalers and pharmacists to import drugs from Canada, and an additional industry-led pathway that would open importation from other countries.
The second pathway could facilitate importation that would allow drugmakers to import their own drugs that were intended for distribution abroad and create new National Drug Codes (NDCs) to sell drugs at lower prices in the United States.
Spatz said that drugmakers have already found ways to create new NDCs for existing drugs and create authorized generics without the FDA’s guidance.
“It is not obvious why this would be a better or easier or lower-cost pathway to do it,” he said.