China’s new drug insurance: lifeline for patients or squeeze on big pharmaceutical firms?

Mainland China’s 17 million Alzheimer’s patients can, for the first time, pay less out of pocket for a costly drug touted as “historic” and “the beginning of the end” for the memory-robbing disease after Beijing launched a commercial insurance innovative drug list in an effort to make medicines more accessible and affordable. Leqembi, developed by Japan’s Eisai and costing a mainland Chinese patient about US$28,400 a year, could see its price cut by half after it was added to the inaugural...