As community activists in Massachusetts’s 1st Congressional District, we constantly hear stories from our neighbors about how they or a loved one struggle to afford their prescription drug medications. Too often people in our communities are forced to choose between paying for their medications or paying for necessities like groceries and rent. Some even turn to cutting their pills in half or taking half of their prescribed insulin — sometimes with deadly consequences. Meanwhile, the companies responsible for this crisis continue to hike the prices of their medications faster than inflation despite already making record profits.
This year alone, dozens of pharmaceutical companies hiked hundreds of drug prices by up to 15 times the rate of inflation. And a recent analysis from Bloomberg Government found that from 2013 through 2017, Big Pharma increased the price of 22 Medicare drugs by a whopping 500 percent. These companies have a track record of not only increasing prices year after year but of blocking competition from generics by creating patent thickets around their top selling drugs. Big Pharma also loves playing the blame game, and frequently points to research & development (R&D) costs for their ever-increasing prices. But the truth is, Big Pharma’s profits continue to rise and their spending on R&D is dwarfed in comparison to their record spending on lobbying and advertising.
And now — despite our lawmakers promises to lower drug prices and hold these companies accountable — Big Pharma is skirting responsibility for their price-gouging tactics by placing blame on pharmacy benefit managers under the Trump Administration’s new Rebate Rule proposal. Under this proposal, pharmacy benefit managers would be barred from negotiating rebates with drug manufacturers on Medicare Part D drugs. Currently, pharmacy benefit managers pass on rebates to patients in the form of lower out-of-pocket-costs and act as a check on Big Pharma. Without them, Big Pharma would have a complete monopoly over the drug pricing supply chain for Medicare Part D drugs. Not only would their power go unchecked but the administration’s own actuaries at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) estimate that these companies would receive a $137 billion bailout from this rule.
Even worse than handing $137 billion to the companies responsible for this crisis, there is little evidence to suggests that drug prices would even decrease under this rule. In fact, those same CMS analysts found that drug prices could even increase before leveling out to the same prices they are now. Today, one-in-four Americans can’t afford their prescription drug medications. We can’t afford to keep prices the same while letting Big Pharma have free reign and an extra hundred billion dollars to pad their bottom lines.
To add salt to the wound, this proposal would also be devastating for the nearly 750,000 Massachusetts’s seniors and disabled who rely on Medicare for their prescription drug medications. The CMS analysts predict that this rule would hike Medicare premiums by 25 percent with a 19 percent hike next year alone. Many of these patients live on a fixed income and already can’t afford to pay for their medications – hiking premiums would only exacerbate the crisis.
It’s about time our lawmakers, like Congressman Neal, stood up for our communities and told Washington special interests that enough is enough. We need real reform now that will hold Big Pharma accountable by increasing competition and transparency to lower the costs of prescription drugs. Bay Staters are depending on it.
David Greenberg, a Colrain resident, wrote on behalf of the CD-01 Progressive Coalition, which includes the following groups: Franklin County Continuing the Political Revolution; Rise Up Western Mass Indivisible; Indivisible Pittsfield; Pioneer Valley Women’s March; Our Revolution Chicopee; Voices Rising Together (Granville); Indivisible Williamsburg; New Marlborough Democratic Committee; Colrain Democratic Town Committee; Greylock Together; and Pioneer Valley Resistance Coalition.