Hillary Clinton's Plan to Deal With Pharmaceutical Price Hikes
Today Hillary Clinton is announcing a new plan to
protect Americans from unjustified price hikes of long-available
prescription drugs with limited competition, like EpiPens and
pyrimethamine, the drug for a disease related to AIDS that Turing
Pharmaceuticals raised the price of by more than 5,000%. After speaking
out against excessive prices for prescription drugs throughout the
campaign and, last week, calling for Mylan to lower its EpiPen price,
Clinton believes that Mylan’s recent actions have not gone far enough to
remedy their outrageous price increase. So today, Clinton is proposing a
new set of strong tools that will let the government take effective
action in such cases where public health is put at risk by an
unjustified, outlier price increase for a treatment long available on
the market with limited competition.
“Over the past year, we’ve
seen far too many examples of drug companies raising prices excessively
for long-standing, life-saving treatments with little or no new
innovation or R&D,” Clinton said. “It’s time to move beyond talking
about these price hikes and start acting to address them. All Americans
deserve full access to the medications they need — without being
burdened by excessive, unjustified costs. Our pharmaceutical and biotech
industries are an incredible source of American innovation and
revolutionary treatments for debilitating diseases. But I’m ready to
hold drug companies accountable when they try to put profits ahead of
patients, instead of back into research and innovation.”
Today, building off the comprehensive plan she
offered earlier in the campaign last year, Clinton is calling for
action to protect consumers from unjustified prescription drug price
increases by companies that are marketing long-standing, life-saving
treatments and face little or no competition. She’ll start by convening
representatives of Federal agencies charged with ensuring health and
safety, as well as fair competition, to create a dedicated group charged with protecting consumers from outlier price increases. They
will determine an unjustified, outlier price increase based on specific
criteria including: 1) the trajectory of the price increase; 2) the
cost of production; and 3) the relative value to patients,among other
factors that give rise to threatening public health.
Should an
excessive, outlier price increase be determined for a long-standing
treatment, Clinton’s plan would make new enforcement tools available
including:
- Making alternatives available and increasing competition: Directly
intervening to make treatments available, and supporting alternative
manufacturers that enter the market and increase competition, to bring
down prices and spur innovation in new treatments.
- Emergency importation of safe treatments: Broadening
access to safe, high-quality alternatives through emergency importation
from developed countries with strong safety standards.
- Penalties for unjustified price increase to hold drug companies accountable and fund expanded access: Holding
drug makers accountable for unjustified price increases with new
penalties, such as fines – and using the funds or savings to expand
access and competition.
Her plan will establish dedicated
consumer oversight at our public health and competition agencies. They
will determine an unjustified, outlier price increase based on specific
criteria including: 1) the trajectory of the price increase; 2) the cost
of production; and 3) the relative value to patients, among other
factors that give rise to threatening public health.
In combination with her broader plan –
which addresses the costs facing consumers from both long-standing and
patented drugs – these new tools to address price spikes for treatments
available for many years will lower the burden of prescription drug
costs for all Americans.
This plan would impact the many examples
we’ve seen over the past year of drug companies raising prices
excessively for drugs that have been available for years – from Turing
raising the price of pyrimethamine for AIDS patients by over 5,500 percent,
to Mylan raising the price of the EpiPen by more than 400 percent. This
is not an isolated problem: Between 2008 and 2015, drug makers
increased the prices of almost 400 generic drugs by over 1,000 percent.
Many of these companies are an example of a troubling
trend—manufacturers that do not even develop the drug themselves, but
acquire it and raise the price.
The immediate protections she is offering today build on her broader plan to lower prescription drug costs for all Americans that she released last year.
The full fact sheet is available here.
