Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, pressed executives from Bristol Myers Squibb, Merck and Johnson & Johnson about the costs they cost for drugs in the U.S.
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Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, pressed executives from Bristol Myers Squibb, Merck and Johnson & Johnson about the costs they cost for drugs in the U.S.
Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
Sparks flew on Capitol Hill Thursday as the CEOs of three drug corporations confronted questions from the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions about why drug costs are so much larger in the United States than they’re in the remainder of the world.
The executives from Bristol Myers Squibb, Johnson & Johnson and Merck spent nearly three hours in entrance of the committee going backwards and forwards about pricing practices and the way the corporations spend their cash.
“We are all aware of the many important lifesaving drugs that your companies have produced,” stated a noticeably subdued Sen. Bernie Sanders, Vermont Independent and the committee chairman. “That is extraordinarily important. But as all of you know, those drugs do nothing for anybody who cannot afford it.”
Merck’s most cancers drug Keytruda prices $100,000 more in the U.S. than it does in France, according to a committee analysis. Bristol Myers Squibb’s blood thinner Eliquis prices nearly 10 instances more in the U.S. than in Germany. Johnson & Johnson’s arthritis drug Stelara prices 5 instances more in the U.S. than it does in Japan.
Patients flip to GoFundMe
The executives made acquainted arguments that the U.S. pays more for drugs but additionally will get new drugs sooner. The drugmakers additionally stated that middlemen referred to as pharmaceutical profit managers, or PBMs, take an enormous share of the checklist costs for themselves.
“Their negotiating strength has increased dramatically,” Merck CEO Robert Davis stated. “In contracting with them, Merck continues to experience increasing pressure to provide even larger discounts. And the gap between list and net price continues to grow, and patients are not benefiting from the steep discounts we provide.”
However, the legislators have been ready and infrequently shot again, as an illustration, that whereas drugs take longer to get on the market in Japan and Canada, as an illustration, that hasn’t damage these nations’ life expectations. In truth, individuals in Japan and Canada dwell longer, on common, than they do in the United States.
Sanders requested Merck’s Davis if he had ever searched GoFundMe to see if anybody was attempting to lift cash to pay for Keytruda. He stated he hadn’t. Sanders stated his employees had.
“We have found over 500 stories of people trying to raise funds to pay for their cancer treatments,” he stated. “And one of those stories is a woman named Rebecca, the school lunch lady from Nebraska with two kids who died of cancer after setting up a GoFundMe page because she could not afford to pay for Keytruda. Rebecca had raised $4,000 on her GoFundMe page, but said the cost of Keytruda in a cancer treatment was $25,000 for an infusion every three weeks.”
Drama behind the scenes
The CEOs of Merck and Johnson & Johnson initially declined to testify. Sanders stated they told his staff they didn’t have the expertise to speak about drug pricing.
“Merck went so far as to tell our staff that their CEO is a tax attorney who is not an expert on prescription drug prices,” Sanders advised reporters on Jan. 25, calling the causes corporations supplied for declining to testify “laughable to absurd.”
The committee was about to vote on subpoenaing the CEOs once they agreed to testify voluntarily.
The commerce group PhRMA, which stands for Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, emailed a preemptive assertion Wednesday that stated evaluating drug costs in the U.S. to these overseas does not inform the entire story. The commerce group stated that new medicines launch earlier in the U.S. than in the remainder of the world, giving Americans sooner entry. It additionally pointed the finger at different excessive well being care spending and PBMs.
“Allowing foreign governments to influence U.S. prices won’t fix America’s health care system,” PhRMA wrote.
Senate report paperwork drugmakers’ monetary decisions
Early this week, the HELP Committee launched a report that discovered Bristol Myers Squibb, Johnson & Johnson and Merck spend more on govt compensation, inventory buybacks and dividends than they do on analysis and improvement.
“In other words, these companies are spending more to enrich their own stockholders and CEOs than they are in finding new cures and new treatments,” Sanders reiterated in his opening assertion at the listening to. “Now, the average American who hears all this is asking a very simple question. How does all of this happen? “
The report confirmed that these corporations make more cash promoting their widespread drugs in the U.S. than promoting them in the remainder of the world mixed. The report additionally discovered that whereas some drug costs climb in the U.S., they go down or keep the similar elsewhere.