Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., released a new bill on Tuesday that would require drug companies to lower prices to match prices from other countries or lose their market exclusivity, an idea that’s similar to one the Trump administration has proposed.
“No other country allows pharmaceutical companies to charge any price they want for any reason they want,” Sanders said in a statement. “Somebody in America today can walk into a pharmacy and find out that the medicine they have been using for years can double, triple or quadruple literally overnight. That needs to change.”
The bill is similar to a proposal released by the Trump administration last month to require drugmakers to match the price paid for certain Medicare drugs to the price paid overseas.
The bill from Sanders and Khanna requires the Trump administration to make sure Americans don’t pay more for prescription drugs than the average price of five countries: Canada, United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Japan.
If a drugmaker does not lower prices to that level, then the “federal government would approve cheaper generic versions of these drugs, regardless of any patents or market exclusivities in place.”
The Trump administration’s proposal would tie prices paid by Medicare for physician-administered drugs like chemotherapy to the average price paid by countries overseas such as Germany or France. The administration hopes to release a proposed regulation for the change by spring 2019.
The pharmaceutical industry slammed Trump’s proposal as “foreign-based price controls.”
Sanders and Khanna’s proposal goes much further by taking away market exclusivity that drugmakers receive from the Food and Drug Administration when a product is approved. A new drug typically gets five years of market exclusivity.
