The report itself is scheduled for release in October 2026, and its scope is unusually broad for this kind of analysis. Rather than simply cataloging list prices at launch, the 2026 edition will examine launch price trends across four full years of FDA approvals, spanning 2022 through 2025. That longitudinal window matters. A single year of launch prices can be distorted by a handful of high-profile gene therapies or cancer treatments; four years of data allow analysts to distinguish genuine market-wide trends from statistical noise, and to see whether the trajectory of introductory prices is rising faster than inflation, faster than the economy as a whole, or in line with the added clinical value that new drugs actually deliver.

The access component is arguably the more novel half of the project. ICER and West Health plan to combine real-world pharmacy and medical claims data with payer coverage policies and direct patient surveys, building a picture of what happens after a drug is approved and priced. List price is only the opening move in a complicated negotiation between manufacturers, insurers, pharmacy benefit managers, and patients. A drug may carry a headline price of hundreds of thousands of dollars a year yet be broadly covered with manageable cost-sharing, or a nominally cheaper medicine may sit behind restrictive prior-authorization requirements, step therapy protocols, or specialty-tier coinsurance that effectively locks patients out. By triangulating claims data, coverage policy documents, and patient-reported experience, the report aims to measure that second, less visible dimension of the market.

ICER published the first edition of the Launch Price and Access Report in 2025, and its findings signaled a significant jump in launch prices that outpaced both inflation and gross domestic product growth. That debut established the methodology the partnership will now extend: tracking the introductory prices of newly approved treatments and comparing them against benchmarks of economic growth and the clinical benefit those treatments provide. The 2025 report’s central finding, that launch prices were climbing well beyond general economic measures, set the stage for the question the 2026 edition will pursue: whether that pattern persisted through 2025, and whether patient access kept pace, deteriorated, or held steady as prices rose.

The institutional logic of the partnership is straightforward. ICER brings the analytical machinery of comparative effectiveness review, a framework it has refined over more than a decade of assessing drugs against clinical evidence and assigning them value-based price benchmarks. West Health brings a policy focus sharpened by years of research on healthcare costs, particularly as they bear on older adults, along with the polling infrastructure of the West Health-Gallup Center on Healthcare in America. Together, the two organizations are positioning the annual report as a recurring, independent yardstick for a market that has historically lacked one. There is no official government publication that systematically tracks launch prices of newly approved drugs against their clinical value; the field has relied on academic analyses and nonprofit reports to fill that gap.

The urgency behind the collaboration is documented in the West Health-Gallup Center’s State of the States 2025 report on healthcare in America. According to that survey, one in five Americans, a record high of 20 percent, said they or someone in their household could not afford prescription medications in the previous three months. Nearly one in three reported skipping a needed medical procedure or test within the past year because of cost. Almost half of adults said they worry they will not be able to afford necessary healthcare services next year. Those figures describe a population for whom the price of a new medicine is not an abstract policy debate but a monthly arithmetic of refills, rent, and groceries.

Leadership at both organizations framed the partnership in terms of that lived reality. Sarah K. Emond, ICER’s president and chief executive officer, said the institute is proud to work with a partner that shares its mission of addressing access and affordability challenges for patients, and that together the organizations will provide an independent analysis of launch price trends over the past four years while assessing patient access to newly launched medicines. Timothy Lash, president and chair of the West Health Policy Center, offered a sharper formulation of the problem. Prescription drugs, he noted, are a key tool for enabling healthy aging, but high prices continue to put needed treatments out of reach for far too many Americans, including older adults. New drugs should improve people’s health, he argued, and the financial reward for developing them should reflect those improvements.

Lash’s comment gestures at the economic theory that underpins ICER’s entire enterprise: the idea that a drug’s price should be proportional to the health it produces. In a well-functioning market, value and price track each other, and the promise of reward drives investment toward the innovations that deliver the greatest benefit. When launch prices detach from measured clinical value, the incentive structure warps. Manufacturers are rewarded for prices that bear little relation to therapeutic advance, payers respond with tighter utilization management, and patients encounter a coverage landscape that grows more labyrinthine each year. Understanding the value of new drugs, as Lash put it, is critical for developing policies that ensure affordable access while also signaling to innovators that the best drugs get the best prices. The annual report is designed to supply exactly that understanding, year after year, in a form that policymakers, payers, and researchers can cite and compare over time.

The methodological stakes are considerable. Claims data reveal what patients actually filled and what they actually paid, capturing the discounts, rebates, and coverage decisions that never appear on a list price. Payer coverage policies reveal the formal architecture of access, including which drugs land on preferred tiers and which require documented failure of cheaper alternatives first. Patient surveys add the dimension neither dataset can supply: whether people delayed filling a prescription, cut pills in half, or abandoned a therapy at the pharmacy counter. No single source tells the whole story, and the report’s triangulation of all three is what distinguishes it from the price-tracking exercises that dominate pharmaceutical market coverage.

For the pharmaceutical industry, the annualized report creates a new layer of public accountability. Launch prices are set in a period of deliberate opacity, before rebate negotiations are visible and before utilization data accumulate, and manufacturers have long defended introductory prices as reflecting anticipated value and development costs. A recurring, independent analysis that publishes those prices alongside measures of patient access will make it harder for the market’s opening moves to escape scrutiny, and easier for legislators, insurers, and patient advocates to argue from evidence rather than anecdote. Whether the 2026 findings show the price trajectory of 2022 through 2025 bending toward value or continuing to outrun it, the report will establish a baseline that future years can be measured against, which is precisely what an annual series is built to do. The complete report timeline is available through ICER’s assessment page, and the findings, when they arrive in October, will land in the middle of an ongoing national argument about what Americans should pay for the newest medicines, and who gets left behind when the answer is too high.

Subject of Research: Annual analysis of launch prices and patient access for newly approved FDA drugs

Article Title: ICER, West Health partner on annual new drug Launch Price and Access Report

Article References: ICER, West Health partner on annual new drug Launch Price and Access Report. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

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Keywords: ICER, West Health, drug pricing, FDA approvals, patient access, prescription drug costs, health policy, launch prices, pharmaceutical industry, healthcare affordability, drug value assessment, Gallup survey