Bayer’s Marijn Dekkers warns Boston College Chief Executives’ Club audience that push to cut health care costs threatens innovation

By Robert Weisman, Globe Staff

The chairman of German drug giant Bayer AG told a Boston audience Wednesday that the global push to control health care costs threatens biopharmaceutical innovation.

Because of the economic slowdown worldwide, countries are becoming more reluctant to give drug makers adequate reimbursement, Marijn Dekkers told nearly 300 people at the Boston College Chief Executives’ Club of Boston luncheon at the Boston Harbor Hotel.

“There is tremendous pressure all over the world in countries to bring down the price of prescription drugs,” he said. “The danger of pushing prices down, down, down is that the system for developing drugs will lose its attractiveness.”

Dekkers, a former chief executive of Waltham-based Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc., said that Bayer has no plans to open operations in the Boston area.

“We have a strong presence in New Jersey and San Francisco,” he said. “And we have chosen in the past not to fragment this. It is not something against Boston.”