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This piece originally ran in Roll Call on January 15, 2026
Now more than ever, we need to listen to and respect one another’s views and values, whether on the floor of Congress or in individual health care decisions. PIPC appreciates the administration’s goals to lower health costs for patients. PIPC remains concerned that the latest proposals to advance a Most Favored Nation pricing model for drugs will, in effect, import the worst of foreign health systems – their reliance on discriminatory value assessments. Stories from outside the U.S., like that of the Williams’ family, illustrate why quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) have no place in U.S. policy. Patients do not have the luxury of time.
This piece originally ran in Health Affairs on Oct. 26, 2025.
For more than 40 years, I have advocated against policies that discriminate against people with disabilities and other vulnerable populations. The Partnership to Improve Patient Care (PIPC) has issued the following statement calling on the Trump administration to avoid policies that discriminate against patients and people with disabilities.
For Immediate Release
January 17, 2025 Today, the Partnership to Improve Patient Care (PIPC) issued a statement on the selection of drugs subject to Medicare price negotiations in 2027.
This op-ed originally appeared in The Hill on September 14, 2021
 This article originally appeared in Inside Health Policy on March 25, 2021
In preparation for a Senate hearing that will highlight lower foreign drug prices, a coalition that includes drug makers and patients is reminding Democrats that their 2020 party platform opposes using a metric that is key to drug-value assessments: quality-adjusted life years (QALY). 
An article for MedPage Today highlighted Partnership to Improve Patient Care's (PIPC) opposition to the Trump administration’s executive order that would import discriminatory quality-adjusted-life-years metrics into the U.S. PIPC Chairman Tony Coelho’s noted that the discriminatory metrics that the order is set to adopt would “devalue the lives of seniors, people with disabilities and serious chronic conditions." "Other countries use these metrics to ration healthcare,” said Chairman Coelho. “It is dangerous to import foreign pricing policies, and the associated access barriers that come with them."
 An article in Inside Health Policy highlighted the Partnership to Improve Patient Care (PIPC) and Value Our Health's criticism of the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review's (ICER) use of the discriminatory quality-adjusted-life-year (QALY). The article astutely points out that the QALY metric has been spurned by Congress, restricting the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute's (PCORI) use of the value assessment measures. The piece also amplifies PIPC's work in pushing for value assessments that incorporate patient preferences and don't utilize a one-size-fits-all approach. "The issue we are tackling today is making sure as we move down that path, that we don’t do it in a manner that discriminates against patients,” said PIPC Executive Director Sara van Geertruyden.
 An article in The Pink Sheet highlighted the Partnership to Improve Patient Care (PIPC)'s involvement with Value Our Health -- a new initiative supported by organizations representations patients and people with disabilities. The article highlights Value Our Health's opposition to the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review's (ICER) use of the quality-adjusted-life-years (QALY) metric, nothing that the patients groups have long criticized the method as a one-size-fits-all approach to addressing the needs of patients. "It is disappointing that ICER continues to reference the QALY as the 'gold standard' despite that it distorts and misrepresents how patients value their own lives, and it can lead to insurers and the government to deny care to people who would benefit from it," said PIPC executive director Sara van Geertruyden. "There are other ways of conducting value assessment, it's just they just really don't have the investment that ICER has."
STAT News: ICER Says Pricing for Novartis MS Drug 'Far Out of Line,' But More Groups Push Back6/27/2019
 An article for STAT News highlighted Partnership to Improve Patient Care's (PIPC) Disability Advocate Ari Ne’eman's comments on the importance of assessing the value of medicines using treatment metrics that are specific to particular conditions or diagnosis, instead of relying on the flawed quality-adjusted-life-years (QALY) method. Ne’eman noted that due to the fact that it is inherently discriminatory against certain patients, the use of the QALY method in determining coverage for health plans is “of grave concern.” The article also amplifies Value Our Health's criticism of discriminatory value assessments during a briefing the group held, in which patient groups discussed objections to the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review’s (ICER) recent analysis of a Novartis MS drug and a new Johnson & Johnson antidepressant.
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