By Emmarie
Huetteman and Rachel
Bluth JANUARY 29, 2019
[UPDATED Jan. 30]
Senators
railed against pharmaceutical executives Tuesday for declining to testify
before Congress about out-of-control drug prices, as lawmakers on both sides of
the U.S. Capitol kicked off investigations sure to rattle one of the nation’s
most powerful industries.
Sen.
Chuck Grassley of Iowa, the Republican chairman of the Senate Committee on
Finance, signaled he could compel drugmakers to appear before the committee,
saying he was “extremely disappointed” that only two companies 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 said.
And in
a blow to the pharmaceutical industry, Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, the
committee’s top Democrat, agreed with Grassley, suggesting the parties are
largely united in their determination to address skyrocketing drug costs.
“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 said.
While
Congress has examined rising drug costs before, the issue has benefited from
the attention of President Donald Trump, who has vowed to address the problem.
The Trump administration has floated a handful of possible solutions, including
a proposal to tie the price Medicare pays for some drugs to the prices paid for
the same drugs overseas.
Across
the Capitol on Tuesday, the House Committee on Oversight and Reform also held
the first hearing in its own “sweeping” investigation into drug prices. Rep.
Elijah Cummings, the Maryland Democrat who took control of the committee this
month, recently wrote to
12 drug companies demanding information about their pricing practices.
Cummings
has made it clear that he is interested in working with the Trump
administration on drug prices. Cummings met with Trump in 2017, weeks after
Trump was sworn in as president, to discuss how the parties could work
together. Two weeks ago, Cummings discussed the issue with Health and Human
Services Secretary Alex Azar.
Tuesday,
one Republican lawmaker close to Trump, Rep. Mark Meadows of North Carolina,
said he had spoken with Trump and agreed to pass along 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 said.
Cummings
asked Meadows to tell Trump “we are willing, ready and able to work with him to
get it done.”
Lawmakers
heard heart-wrenching testimony Tuesday from two mothers about the impact of
rising costs on their insulin-dependent children. Antroinette Worsham described
how her daughter, a college student with Type 1 diabetes, began rationing her
insulin because she couldn’t afford it — and how her son later found her dead
in her bed.
Now,
Worsham told the House committee, she worries about her younger daughter, who
also has diabetes. “I fear the same is going to happen to her,” Worsham said.
On the
Senate side, Kathy Sego — whose son with Type 1 diabetes was profiled by Kaiser Health News in
2017 — had a message for absent drug companies. “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 said. “That should
never be a decision a person needs to make.”
It
remains to be seen how drugmakers might react to mounting political scrutiny.
Both
Grassley and Cummings have the power to subpoena witnesses — such as drug
company executives — to appear before Congress, though Grassley told reporters
afterward that he was not yet prepared to invoke that option.
Grassley
said several drug companies had declined to testify publicly, offering a
variety of excuses. One company, for instance, 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 companies by comparing them to a more
traditional villain, the tobacco companies.
“Even
the Big Tobacco CEOs were willing to come to Congress and testify, and they
made a product that kills people,” he said. “They all lied to me, but at least
they showed up. The drugmakers won’t even do that much.”
While
lawmakers noted that both hearings were only the first of many, an early
consensus emerged that something must be done about drug rebates, which provide
discounts to middlemen in the supply chain but often push patients toward
pricier brand-name drugs.
Senators
also targeted drug discount coupons, which lower the price for patients at the
cash register but don’t address the larger struggle between manufacturers and
insurance companies.
“We
know who’s winning. It’s the people who print the coupons,” said Peter Bach,
director of the Center for Health Policy and Outcomes at the Memorial Sloan
Kettering Cancer Center. “Patients are entirely caught in the middle.”
The
long political reach of the drug industry was on display Tuesday, though,
suggesting it could be an uphill battle to hold pharmaceutical companies
accountable. Drugmakers’ political action committees give millions of dollars to
the campaigns of hundreds of members of Congress.
The
Project on Government Oversight, a nonpartisan watchdog group, notedeven some of the
experts who testified Tuesday have benefited from drugmaker cash. The
Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, which lobbies on behalf
of drugmakers, has given millions to the advocacy arm of the American Action
Forum — a conservative-leaning organization whose president, Douglas
Holtz-Eakin, testified before senators.
Bach
has also received money from pharmaceutical companies directly, the watchdog
group said. Bach said he was paid for giving speeches.
Another
potential obstacle: House Republicans on Tuesday showed little interest in
cooperating with the investigation, with some arguing that there were bigger
fish to fry in the nation’s health care system.
Rep.
Jim Jordan of Ohio, the House committee’s top Republican, opened by enumerating
several 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 said. “It’s that
government interventions in the market have distorted incentives, creating
barriers to competition and left things in a mess.”
[Correction: This story was updated at 1 p.m. ET on Jan. 30 to
correct the name of the organization for which Douglas Holtz-Eakin serves
as president.]
Emmarie
Huetteman: ehuetteman@kff.org,
@emmarieDC
Rachel
Bluth: rbluth@kff.org,
@RachelHBluth
No comments:
Post a Comment