The Price of Price Controls: How Europe's Experiment Left Patients Behind
- 2 days ago
- 2 min read
A growing body of evidence demonstrates that government price setting, regardless of its intentions, has a negative impact on the innovation landscape and patient access.
Europe serves as a prime example.
Once a leader in global biopharmaceutical innovation, the continent has fallen from the ranks, allowing the United States and China to surge ahead.
Recent reports from the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA) illustrate just how severe the access gap has become. In 2025, 49% of all innovative medicines were unavailable to patients in Europe.
Price controls are not the only culprit – slowed drug approval processes further undermine patient access. The EFPIA’s WAIT index, which tracks the number of FDA-approved medicines that are subsequently approved by European regulators, shows a significant disparity in access to new medicines. The median time to availability is across the continent is 532 days, with an 88% gap between the highest- and lowest-access countries.
Drug pricing policy should place patient access at its center. Instead, policymakers in Europe have taken shortcuts that undermine both innovation and the patients they serve.
And they show no signs of letting up. Most recently, Germany has moved to implement further price controls on prescription drugs, a step that would shift the burden of financing innovation onto the U.S. and other countries leading in cutting-edge treatments.
Europe’s experience holds lessons for policymakers in the U.S. In the face of rising competition from China, it is critical that American policymakers pay close attention to the repercussions of price control policies before history repeats itself.
To learn more about how price controls reduce patients’ access to innovative medicines, check out the following WWFH resources: