TAPP Encourages Senate Judiciary: Focus on Real Obstacles to Drug Affordability in Upcoming Hearing
The Trade Alliance to Promote Prosperity today wrote to the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary, ahead of an expected November 17 hearing titled “Prescribing Sunshine: How Competition and Transparency Lowers Prescription Drug Costs, encouraging lawmakers to focus on the real obstacles to competition and affordability in America’s prescription drug marketplace.
In part, TAPP wrote the following:
American patients deserve affordable medicines, transparent pricing, and meaningful competition. Achieving those goals requires confronting the enormous market power of pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), health insurers, and other intermediaries whose business practices can prevent patients from benefiting from lower-cost medicines.
Equally important, Congress must resist efforts to undermine the intellectual property protections that have made the United States the world’s leading developer of innovative medicines. Weakening patents will not solve the structural problems that drive up patients’ costs. Indeed, it risks sacrificing tomorrow’s medical breakthroughs without delivering meaningful savings today.
Congress should increase transparency into PBM compensation and rebate arrangements; prohibit anticompetitive steering toward affiliated pharmacies and products; investigate exclusionary formulary practices; strengthen oversight of vertically integrated insurers and PBMs; and ensure that 340B incentives support patients rather than discourage lower-cost competition…
At the same time, Congress should preserve robust patent protections, evaluate allegations of patent abuse using credible evidence, and recognize the importance of post-approval pharmaceutical innovation. The central question should not be how to weaken the patent system that makes medical breakthroughs possible. It should be why patients are too often denied the savings that competition has already produced.
America can have both affordable medicines and world-leading pharmaceutical innovation. Achieving that outcome requires greater transparency, stronger competition, and accountability throughout the prescription drug supply chain—not policies that jeopardize the intellectual property protections underpinning American medical leadership…