In a familiar story line, investors in Big Pharma have a drug-pricing problem. This time, however, the script has flipped.

The drug industry is a standard punching bag for politicians, and that shouldn’t be any different as a new election cycle begins. As usual, a swath of the industry chose to raise prices of older medicines as the calendar turned to 2019. The increases were mostly modest, though a few were double-digit-percentage price boosts.

Pricing trends, however, actually have moderated of late. Analysts at Leerink Partners last month found that the largest 17 drug companies took 106 price increases on existing products last year. That is down 31 percent from a year earlier and the lowest since at least 2014.

The magnitude of price increases also is weakening. Overall, those companies raised net prices 2 percent on average this year, down from 8 percent in 2013, according to the Leerink analysis.

That is the latest sign that the pharmaceuticals industry isn’t chiefly to blame for high health-care costs, which should help their case in Washington. Overall retail drug spending grew by just 0.4 percent in 2017, according to data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Larger categories of health spending, such as spending at hospitals or at doctor’s offices, grew closer to 4 percent.

But by relying less on price increases, drug companies actually are trading one problem for another. The Leerink analysis found that the industry’s growth rate will likely be 2 to 4 percentage points slower in the years to come than in the past five-year period.

That presents a challenge for how to please investors. After all, finding ways to grow with new products has become far more challenging for companies. The industry’s return on research-and-development spending fell to just 1.9 percent this year, according to an analysis by Deloitte. That return was 10.1 percent at the start of the decade and has declined steadily since then.

Raising prices on existing products is a natural way to solve the problem. Buying up smaller biotechnology companies also can help, but doing so effectively is far easier said than done.

Big Pharma stocks were a bright spot in a dismal U.S. market last year, living up to their status as a defensive play, but a slower growth outlook could catch up to them in 2019. The new industry strategy might draw less ire in Washington, but the industry will be hard-pressed to stay in the good graces of Wall Street.

Many drugmakers raised prices on older medicines in the new year. A technician works at a Kentucky pharmacy.

REUTERS