By Sally C. Pipes and Wayne Winegarden
The death rate from cancer in the United States has fallen by more than one-third since 1991. HIV-related mortality has dropped ninefold since 1995. Death rates for Alzheimer’s, chronic respiratory diseases, and stroke have all declined in recent years, too.
These gains didn’t happen by accident. They’re the result of decades of medical innovation that have helped people live longer, healthier lives.
These pharmaceutical breakthroughs have delivered enormous value beyond the bedside. By preventing hospitalizations, reducing complications, and enabling people to remain productive for longer, new medicines and treatments generate broadly shared benefits for society and the economy.
Now, some lawmakers are putting that progress at risk by trying to give the government more power over drug prices.
That’s a mistake. High drug prices are not a market failure. They are what make high-risk, high-reward medical innovations possible.
Developing a new medicine can take more than a decade and cost billions of dollars. In 2025, large pharmaceutical companies invested $159 billion in research and development. Small and mid-sized biotechs have invested hundreds of billions more.
Most experimental drugs fail — nine in 10, according to researchers. The entire biotech sector depends on the possibility that the returns from a small number of successes will cover the financial losses associated with dead ends along the way.
The system also depends on strong and predictable patent protections that give innovators a limited window to earn a return on their investments.
Consider Keytruda, an immunotherapy that harnesses the body’s immune system to fight cancer. Nearly 3 million patients have benefited from the treatment.
Keytruda has been a commercial success. And that’s the point. Without the prospect of that kind of breakthrough, companies could not commit the resources needed to pursue such breakthroughs in the first place.
Or take Gilead’s Sovaldi, the hepatitis C treatment. Before its arrival, patients often faced years of debilitating illness, liver failure, or the need for a transplant. Sovaldi and similar therapies can cure more than 90% of patients in a matter of weeks.
Critics initially focused on the drug’s price tag. But the therapy has saved the healthcare system billions over the long term by preventing costly hospitalizations, liver transplants, and long-term complications.
Those successes don’t just benefit individual patients. They create ripple effects across the entire healthcare system and economy. One recent analysis estimated that medical innovation in HIV, heart disease, breast cancer, and obesity generated roughly $155 trillion in health gains and trillions more in productivity over several decades.
In other words, breakthrough medicines create value that far exceeds their upfront cost.
Price controls undermine this model. By capping potential returns, they reduce the incentive to invest in risky research. That means fewer new drugs, fewer cures, and fewer lives saved.
Lawmakers should be careful what they wish for. Imposing price controls on drugs today could prevent the next Keytruda or Sovaldi from ever being developed.
Sally C. Pipes is President, CEO, and Thomas W. Smith Fellow in Health Care Policy at the Pacific Research Institute. Wayne Winegarden is Senior Fellow in Business and Economics at the Pacific Research Institute and Director of PRI’s Center for Medical Economics and Innovation. This piece originally ran in RealClearHealth.