DailyPharm, an online journalism company, interviewed Prof. Howard Lee as to how new drug accessibility can be increased by easing the current strict criteria for health insurance reimbursement in Korea. More specifically, Prof. Lee argued the ICER cutoff should be lifted much higher to adequately reflect the economic developments over the past decades. Prof. Lee also discussed time has already come to decide if the nation sticks to an old paradigm of ‘reimbursing everything’ in healthcare, which is absolutely unsustainable financially. Prof. Lee urged the Korean government to show leadership developing a society-wide consensus to build a new fund to support patients with life-threatening diseases, who are likely to die soon unless treated with new, innovative drugs, almost all of which are prohibitively expensive.

The details of Prof. Lee’s interview can be found by clicking this link.

The Korean Academy of Health Policy and Management (KAHPM) invited Prof. Lee as chair to a session at the Annual Fall Conference, November 6, 2020. The title of the session Prof. Lee moderated was 'Individualized Reimbursement Model for Innovative Breakthrough Medicines: Introduction to Policies in Advanced Countries', where Prof. Hye-Young Kang, Department of Pharmacy, College of Pharmacy, Yonsei University, gave an overview presentation. There were three panelists in the session, each representing the pharmaceutical industry, government, and press, respectively. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the conference was presented online.  

In her talk, Prof. Kang pointed out that the current reimbursement scheme in Korea, particularly for innovative medicines, has been approached primarily from the cost containment aspect, emphasizing the balance between patients access to innovative drugs and cost. "This is the right time to talk more about drawing a social consensus as to what kinds of extra funding mechanisms other than the nationwide health insurance are available to supplement the limited accessibility to innovative drugs in Korea", Prof. Kang added. 

The full session can be watched here.