Congress needs to fork over more money to help end high drug prices, according to a collection of unions, insurers and consumer groups.
The Campaign for Sustainable Rx Pricing announced a series of proposals Monday to help curb high drug prices. Chief among them is getting policymakers to boost funding for evaluating the value of pharmaceuticals.
The campaign is an arm of the National Coalition on Healthcare, whose vast membership includes the AFL-CIO labor federation, AARP, CVS Health, NAACP and America’s Health Insurance Plans, the top insurance lobbying group.
While the nonprofit doesn’t give an amount Congress should provide, it does outline where more money should go.
The funding should be aimed at “providing information on the comparative effectiveness of different treatments,” a report from the campaign said.
An example is the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review, which is a nonprofit that evaluates the value of medical tests and treatments.
Such an approach can help to ensure consumers aren’t prescribed high-priced drugs that aren’t as effective as cheaper options, members of the coalition said.
But experts behind the proposals said that to get to value-based experiments there needs to be robust competition among pharmaceuticals.
That has been a problem for generic drugs, as several companies have bought the rights to decades-old drugs that have no competition and raised the prices. One example is Turing Pharmaceuticals, which bought the anti-malarial drug Daraprim and raised the price from $13.50 a pill to $750.
The company, formerly led by controversial CEO Martin Shkreli, could do that because Daraprim had no competition and had been on the market as a generic drug for decades.
The campaign proposes speeding Food and Drug Administration approval of generic drugs, which they say can take up to three years or more.
The FDA has said it is working to address the problem, noting that a user fee program in which generic drug makers pay the agency per application has helped to increase the approval process.
The campaign wants the agency to go further and expedite review of new drugs that can compete with pricey ones.
“Incentives should drive competition for expensive treatments where no competitors exist and encourage a second or third market entrant,” according to a report outlining the proposals.
Currently the agency has faster review pathways for drugs that address unmet medical needs, but not for specifically fostering more competition.
Other proposals include forcing drug makers to divulge pricing data and the true cost of research and development, which drug makers say a high price is supposed to recoup.
Prescription drug pricing has surged over the past few years. In 2015, drug spending reached $310 billion after taking into account rebates and price discounts from manufacturers, an 8.5 percent increase from 2014, according to a report from the research firm IMS Health.
A major part of the increase was spending on specialty drugs that treat chronic conditions such as hepatitis and cancer. Spending on the drugs doubled over the last five years and contributed 70 percent of overall medicine spending from 2010 to 2015, IMS found.
Meanwhile, several polls have found that high drug prices have become a top concern for many Americans.
However, it is not clear whether any of the proposals would move in Congress. There has been little to no action on high drug prices.
“We have already been in dialogue with many legislators and political candidates,” John Rother, president and CEO of the National Coalition on Health Care and executive director of the campaign, said during a Monday press conference.
Others were heartened that the issue has received attention from the 2016 presidential candidate.
“Every candidate has been talking about this issue,” said Rick Pollack, president and CEO of the American Hospital Association, a member of the coalition. “I suspect certainly after the election we are going to see some translation into action.”
