Emmarie Huetteman and Rachel Bluth, Kaiser Health News
Senators railed in opposition to pharmaceutical executives Tuesday for declining to testify earlier than Congress about out-of-control drug costs, as lawmakers on each side of the U.S. Capitol kicked off investigations positive to rattle one of many nation’s strongest industries.
Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, the Republican chairman of the Senate Committee on Finance, signaled he may compel drugmakers to look earlier than the committee, saying he was “extremely disappointed” that solely two corporations have agreed to testify at a later date.
“We will extend the opportunity again in the future, but we will be more insistent the next time,” Grassley stated.
And in a blow to the pharmaceutical business, Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, the committee’s high Democrat, agreed with Grassley, suggesting the events are largely united of their willpower to deal with skyrocketing drug prices.
“Nobody is going away, and even if it means using our power to compel the drug company CEOs to show up, they will come before this committee,” Wyden stated.
While Congress has examined rising drug prices earlier than, the problem has benefited from the eye of President Donald Trump, who has vowed to deal with the issue. The Trump administration has floated a handful of attainable options, together with a proposal to tie the value Medicare pays for some medication to the costs paid for a similar medication abroad.
Across the Capitol on Tuesday, the House Committee on Oversight and Reform additionally held the primary listening to in its personal “sweeping” investigation into drug costs. Rep. Elijah Cummings, the Maryland Democrat who took management of the committee this month, recently wrote to 12 drug corporations demanding details about their pricing practices.
Cummings has made it clear that he’s excited by working with the Trump administration on drug costs. Cummings met with Trump in 2017, weeks after Trump was sworn in as president, to debate how the events may work collectively. Two weeks in the past, Cummings mentioned the problem with Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar.
Tuesday, one Republican lawmaker near Trump, Rep. Mark Meadows of North Carolina, stated he had spoken with Trump and agreed to go alongside a message to Cummings: “On this particular subject, not only is he serious, but he’s serious about working in a bipartisan way to lower prescription prices,” Meadows stated.
Cummings requested Meadows to inform Trump “we are willing, ready and able to work with him to get it done.”
Lawmakers heard heart-wrenching testimony Tuesday from two moms concerning the influence of rising prices on their insulin-dependent youngsters. Antroinette Worsham described how her daughter, a school pupil with Type 1 diabetes, started rationing her insulin as a result of she couldn’t afford it — and the way her son later discovered her lifeless in her mattress.
Now, Worsham instructed the House committee, she worries about her youthful daughter, who additionally has diabetes. “I fear the same is going to happen to her,” Worsham stated.
On the Senate facet, Kathy Sego — whose son with Type 1 diabetes was profiled by Kaiser Health News in 2017 — had a message for absent drug corporations. “I don’t know how any person would be OK with knowing that their medication is priced so high you have to make a decision between life or death,” she stated. “That should never be a decision a person needs to make.”
It stays to be seen how drugmakers would possibly react to mounting political scrutiny.
Both Grassley and Cummings have the facility to subpoena witnesses — resembling drug firm executives — to look earlier than Congress, although Grassley instructed reporters afterward that he was not but ready to invoke that choice.
Grassley stated a number of drug corporations had declined to testify publicly, providing quite a lot of excuses. One firm, as an example, argued their testimony would “create a language-barrier problem.” Unmoved, Grassley remarked that he “thought we all spoke English.”
Wyden expressed his frustration with drug corporations by evaluating them to a extra conventional villain, the tobacco corporations.
“Even the Big Tobacco CEOs were willing to come to Congress and testify, and they made a product that kills people,” he stated. “They all lied to me, but at least they showed up. The drugmakers won’t even do that much.”
While lawmakers famous that each hearings had been solely the primary of many, an early consensus emerged that one thing should be finished about drug rebates, which give reductions to middlemen within the provide chain however usually push sufferers towards pricier brand-name medication.
Senators additionally focused drug low cost coupons, which decrease the value for sufferers on the money register however don’t tackle the bigger wrestle between producers and insurance coverage corporations.
“We know who’s winning. It’s the people who print the coupons,” stated Peter Bach, director of the Center for Health Policy and Outcomes on the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. “Patients are entirely caught in the middle.”
The lengthy political attain of the drug business was on show Tuesday, although, suggesting it might be an uphill battle to carry pharmaceutical corporations accountable. Drugmakers’ political motion committees give millions of dollars to the campaigns of a whole bunch of members of Congress.
The Project on Government Oversight, a nonpartisan watchdog group, noted even a few of the consultants who testified Tuesday have benefited from drugmaker money. The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, which lobbies on behalf of drugmakers, has given tens of millions to the advocacy arm of the American Action Network — a conservative-leaning group whose president, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, testified earlier than senators.
Bach has additionally obtained cash from pharmaceutical corporations straight, the watchdog group stated. Bach stated he was paid for giving speeches.
Another potential impediment: House Republicans on Tuesday confirmed little curiosity in cooperating with the investigation, with some arguing that there have been greater fish to fry within the nation’s well being care system.
Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, the House committee’s high Republican, opened by enumerating a number of failings of the Affordable Care Act, noting Democrats are “eager to blame the private sector.”
“The problem is not that the free market has failed us,” Jordan stated. “It’s that government interventions in the market have distorted incentives, creating barriers to competition and left things in a mess.”
Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a nationwide well being coverage information service. It is an editorially unbiased program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation which isn’t affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.