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That is the topic of a U.S. Senate hearing last week. One person testifying was an economist, USC Professor Darius Lakdawalla. While his full testimony is here, his key points of contention are worth reading. These include:

• The challenge for public policy is to sustain the pace of medical innovation while ensuring that valuable new technologies remain affordable and accessible.
• The U.S. is by far the largest market for pharmaceuticals in the world and the engine of global pharmaceutical innovation. Other countries, in effect, free ride off the innovation stimulated by the American market.
• Despite stable or falling net prices paid to prescription drug manufacturers over the past decade novel medicines lie increasingly beyond the financial reach of American patients.
• Blunt price controls are not the solution to the worsening affordability of prescription drugs or to global free-riding: Schaeffer Center research suggests that introducing European-style pricing policies would reduce Americans’ life expectancy. …

GoFundMe started as a crowdfunding site for underwriting “ideas and dreams,” and, as GoFundMe’s co-founders, Andrew Ballester and Brad Damphousse, once put it, “for life’s important moments.” In the early years, it funded honeymoon trips, graduation gifts, and church missions to overseas hospitals in need. Now GoFundMe has become a go-to platform for patients trying to escape medical billing nightmares.

One study found that, in 2020, the annual number of U.S. campaigns related to medical causes — about 200,000 — was 25 times the number of such campaigns on the site in 2011. More than 500 current campaigns are dedicated to asking for financial help for treating people, mostly kids, who have spinal muscular atrophy, a neurodegenerative genetic condition. The recently approved gene therapy for young children with the condition, by the drugmaker Novartis, has a price tag of about $2.1 million for the single-dose treatment.

Perhaps the most …