Floor Remarks by Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa
On Transparency in Prescription Drug Advertising
Thursday, August 23, 2018
I’m glad to join my friend in this effort because this fits in with a lot of things we’re trying to accomplish that Congress has done for decades. Trying to give consumers information.
Remember maybe 40 years ago, I don’t think its 50 years ago, Congress passed legislation that you had to have a window sticker on cars of the cost of the cars so consumers wouldn’t be battered back and forth between dealers, not knowing what they were dealing with. Or you can’t buy gas today without going to a filling station without a big sign knowing what it costs. Even the pharmaceutical companies themselves want to educate consumers with these ads, and I’ve always supported the advertising of these pharmaceutical drugs, but they want to educate you not only about the value of their drugs, but down to the bottom and then half the ad usually tells you that if you take this drug, what the side effects are going to do, maybe implying it’s life dangerous. That’s a very important thing to educate the public about.
So all we’re trying to do here is have the consumer get the additional information that they need if they want to consider that drug because everybody ought to want to consider the price, just like you consider the price of a car. I try to buy gas at the cheapest filling station I can, because it’s just common sense, right? And so that’s what Senator Durbin is pointing out. This is a Midwestern, commonsense approach to educating the consumers. You know, they want you to buy their product and then they have some question about could you really afford this? A lot of these ads even indicate to the consumer, well maybe if you check with the company or check with somebody, you’ll even get some help buying the drug. So there’s the pharmaceutical companies are already interested in consumer education. We just want to take it one step further. Part of it is because of the high cost of prescription drugs, so we have an opportunity now to do what we all talk about doing, doing something about the cost of pharmaceutical drugs, and this is just a very small step in that direction because it directs Health and Human Services to require drug companies to include the list price of these drugs in their TV ads.
Now the drug companies want you to know that there’s a drug out there to help you. They want you to know the benefits of the drugs, so why don’t they also want you to know about the price of the drug? That is simply, by not having that information out there, it’s simply not a transparent way of doing business. Every other way you want to be transparent, we’re just asking you to take one little small step and tell people what it’s going to cost, like the price of gasoline, like the price of cars, or like you seem to be worried a little bit about the high cost of the drug, that maybe some people might not be able to afford it and you might be criticized for that, you can get help.
So, you know, what we’re up against here is a very powerful interest in this town, and it happens to be an interest that has made life better, longevity for people longer for their life, so we aren’t here to find fault with the pharmaceutical companies, we’re here to encourage the pharmaceutical companies to let the public know what they need to know.
Now you know around here it seems to me we’re running up against the pharmaceutical companies all the time. The CREATES Act came out of my committee 15 to six and we can’t seem to get that up, this amendment is being offered, we know who’s fighting this amendment that Durbin and Grassley are sponsoring, it’s the same companies. There’s a scheme out there that they’ll keep their patented drug on the market longer if they pay a generic drug company to keep their drug off the market, we call it pay for delay, the Klobuchar Grassley bill doesn’t get very far because of these interests. They don’t like the fact that they ought to have some competition from the importation of drugs. They don’t like it now that the FDA new director is moving in the direction of getting generics on the market a little bit sooner, but we aren’t fighting those things now.
What we’re trying to do is pretty darn simple. Think of what’s behind this, now. How often do you get Senator Grassley and Senator Durbin to cooperate on the same thing? Not too often. So that’s something people ought to take into consideration. We have a very good chairman, a very thorough chairman, Alexander of the health committee, he’s backing this effort and has even had a colloquy on that point. We have Azar, the secretary of HHS, saying this is a good thing to do. And maybe two months ago now, Trump and Azar had a news conference on the high cost of drugs and what they could do administratively to move that along, and just this very day, Azar is announcing some regulations going to OMB to move along some of those things that the President was talking about two months ago. And then everybody gets irritated about Trump’s tweets, do they do any good, but most of the time people don’t think they do much good, but he tweeted at about the same time these big pharmaceutical companies announce a whole bunch of their drugs that they were going to increase their prices about 35 and 40 percent. And he tweeted how outrageous that was. A week later, one company said we aren’t going to go ahead. A week later another company said they weren’t going to go ahead. Now whether all the companies have said that, I don’t know but what I’m trying to say here is you’ve got Durbin, Grassley, you’ve got Chairman Alexander, you’ve got the secretary of HHS, you’ve got the President of the United States trying to do something about pharmaceuticals, and here, just a little simple amendment that we’re trying to get on this bill. And we’re running into this obstacle that we run into all the time when all we’re trying to do is educate the consumer the same way the pharmaceutical companies want to educate the consumer. And by the way, 76 percent of Americans in a poll support this, and I think Senator Durbin did better than I can about the interest but I’ll just kind of summarize.
Doctors, hospitals, insurance companies and the AARP support this amendment. So really, since it’s so sensible, since it’s right in line with what the pharmaceutical companies are trying to do with all their TV ads, educate the public, with what Congress has tried to do other times to educate the public, what we’re trying to do through some of our education, to have transparency in the prices that you pay when you go to the hospital, or what we’re trying to do through health savings accounts, get the consumer involved, to do some shopping, to save the consumer money, that’s what this is all about. It’s so simple. I can’t understand why commonsense stuff, well this isn’t a town for commonsense I guess. But we ought to be able to get some of this commonsense stuff done. So I want to thank Senator Durbin because he led this effort and I’m glad to help him. Thank you for doing it.
We’re going to get this done one way or the other. If we don’t get it done on this bill, we’re going to get it done because it’s the right thing to do and if you try long enough, if you’re right you eventually get something done in this town.
-30-