The Senate Finance Committee has outlined the framework the Committee will use to pursue legislative solutions to modernize and enhance federal prescription drug programs.
Senate Finance Committee Ranking Member Mike Crapo (R-ID) and Chair Ron Wyden (D-OR) recently detailed the effort to reduce patient and taxpayer drug costs.
“Some of the most life-saving medications remain out of reach for far too many working families and seniors,” Crapo said. “We need a bipartisan, all-of-the-above approach to modernization and transparency that empowers consumers, plans, providers, and pharmacies to make informed, cost-effective, and clinically appropriate decisions. I thank Senator Wyden for working with me to identify ways to improve prescription drug access and affordability, and look forward to discussing potential consensus-based solutions with our colleagues.”
Potential policy solutions within the framework, per the document, include delinking pharmacy benefit managers’ (PBM) compensation from drug prices to align incentives for lower costs, bolstering PBM accountability to health plan clients as a means of driving cost-cutting competition and producing better choices for beneficiaries, ensuring discounts negotiated by PBMs produce meaningful savings for seniors, and addressing practices unfairly inflating the prices patients and government programs pay for prescription drugs.
“For years, drug pricing middlemen like pharmacy benefit managers have been engaging in practices that are driving up the cost of prescription drugs and clobbering American families at the pharmacy counter,” Wyden said. “The Finance Committee is responsible for federal health programs that spend billions on prescription drugs each year, and we have a responsibility to seniors, working families, and taxpayers to ensure these programs are strengthened and updated to keep up with the health care system of today.”