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WASHINGTON — Plenty of pharmaceutical executives have decried Democrats’ new drug pricing law as detrimental to the industry. But few are willing to say they may be willing to delay treatments for cancer patients if it means making more money.

Genentech CEO Alexander Hardy, in an interview with STAT, explained that in the world that existed prior to the Inflation Reduction Act’s passage last year, drugmakers were incentivized to get drugs on the market as fast as possible, regardless of which disease they would be approved to treat.

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Now, he’s arguing that the law’s new Medicare negotiation program could encourage Genentech to slow-walk research on how a drug could treat diseases with smaller populations in favor of making sure diseases with larger patient populations are the first to market. That would mean the company would sell more medicines in the window before Medicare is allowed to negotiate prices, because the clock for when discounts can kick in is based off of when the drug first goes on the market.

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