entertainment

TRENTON, N.J. — Pharma industry giants including Bristol Myers Squibb, Johnson & Johnson, Novartis, and Novo Nordisk deployed a half-dozen lawyers to a courtroom here Thursday in a bid to dismantle Medicare’s new drug price negotiation program, just hours before President Biden is set to glorify it in his State of the Union.

A federal judge in New Jersey heard an unusual quadruple oral argument in which attorneys for all four drugmakers combined forces to challenge different facets of the Inflation Reduction Act, which in 2022 empowered Medicare to negotiate the prices of a small number of drugs each year beginning in 2026.

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Over four hours, the debate spanned most of the substantive issues that pharmaceutical companies and their allies have raised across the country, both in constitutional challenges to the law and in challenges to how Medicare officials have interpreted the law so far. That means the court’s decision in these cases could produce a first substantive test for several of the arguments that haven’t been addressed by courts in other states, where companies like Boehringer Ingelheim, AstraZeneca, and Merck are also suing, separately, over the same law.

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