Opinion: We must lower prescription drug costs

During a recent campaign stop in Walton, I met a senior couple who shared with me an all-too-familiar dilemma. The wife was diabetic, and she needed several shots of insulin each day, but the cost was so high that the family had to choose between groceries and medicines. The husband — in typical Upstate New York fashion of staying positive in the face of adversity — joked that he needed to lose some weight anyway. But the serious truth is that nobody should have to make those tradeoffs.

Fortunately, Congress recently addressed this issue when it passed legislation to lower the cost of prescription drugs (tinyurl.com/2hyhohhh). The bill took two important steps. First, it allows Medicare to negotiate drug prices. Medicare is the largest purchaser of prescription drugs, but it had been prohibited from using its bargaining power to drive down prices.

Under the new law, Medicare can demand better deals, resulting in hundreds of millions of dollars in cost savings for consumers. Second, the new law caps insulin costs at $35/month and it caps Medicare recipients’ prescription drug costs at $2,000/year.

Remarkably, every single Republican in Congress voted against these measures (and my opponent has stated his opposition to the bill). I suspect they did so because many of them are paid by the pharmaceutical industry’s political action committees (PACs), which opposed the bill. I’m not accepting any corporate PAC money and I would have supported these proposals.

This new law is a necessary step to provide relief for consumers, but more must be done. I support legislation to further reduce prescription drug costs by ending a practice known as “pay-for-delay.” Here’s how that practice works:

When a pharmaceutical company makes a new drug, it receives a patent which makes the company the only seller of the drug for a certain period of time. This policy rewards pharmaceutical companies for new innovations. Once the patent expires, other companies can come to market with generic versions of the drug, thereby creating more options and lower prices for consumers.

However, pharmaceutical companies engage in a practice called “pay-for-delay” to extend the period during which the brand name companies have a monopoly over the drugs. In essence, the brand name companies “pay” the generic companies to “delay” entering the market. These schemes benefit the pharmaceutical companies: the brand name company gets to extend its monopoly and the generic company gets paid to do nothing.

But these schemes impose huge costs on consumers, forcing us to pay about $3.5 billion per year more than we would if generic drugs entered the market more quickly (tinyurl.com/2e493l8j). That’s money that goes into the pharmaceutical companies’ pockets instead of yours.

As counsel in the U.S. Senate, I worked on legislation to stop pay-for-delay deals, and I believe that Congress must empower the Federal Trade Commission to block these deals and require pharmaceutical companies to compensate you for the price increases they cause — because nobody should have to choose between their groceries and their medicines.

Josh Riley is a fifth-generation native of Broome County and a graduate of Union-Endicott High School. A former attorney in the U.S. Senate, he is now running for Congress in New York’s 19th District.