Remarks by Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa
Senior Member and Former Chairman, Senate Finance Committee
The Drug-price Transparency for Consumers (DTC) Act
Tuesday, November 28, 2023
You just heard Senator Durbin say that this bill has passed the Senate once. It’s still not law. We’re back here again, and I hope my fellow senators will see that Senator Durbin and I don’t give up on this important issue of trying to bring a dose of sunshine to the airwaves.
Lowering the cost of prescription drugs is a top priority of mine and most of the senators here.
Without their prescription medication, millions of Americans would not survive.
As a nation, we are incredibly blessed to live in a country where investment and innovation unlock cures and treatments.
But the escalating prices of prescription drugs, partly caused by this advertising that goes on, are a consuming concern for millions of Americans, including Iowans who bring up this subject regularly at my county meetings.
I’ve come to the floor of the Senate to address the sticker shock that greets consumers when they pick up their medicine at the pharmacy or open their medical bills after a hospital visit.
In recent years, I’ve worked in a bipartisan manner to pass the CREATES Act, another bill called the Patient’s Right to Know Act and another one, the Right Rebate Act, into law.
Each lowered prescription drug costs for patients and taxpayers by stopping anti-competitive practices, putting sunlight on medications for consumers at the pharmacy counter and [keeping] drug companies in check.
I was Chairman of the Finance Committee when we hauled Big Pharma in for public hearings.
As Chairman, I also partnered with the senior senator from Oregon on a ground-breaking, two-year investigation into insulin price gouging.
That investigation focused not only on insulin manufacturers, but also, powerful pharmacy benefit managers – PBMs.
I’ve worked to hold PBMs accountable by putting sunlight on their practices and working to ban their anti-competitive behavior that increases costs for patients, rural pharmacies and the taxpayers.
In this Congress, I’ve gotten passed the Prescription Pricing for the People Act out of the Judiciary Committee with bipartisan support.
I hope the Senate doesn’t miss the opportunity to hold the Federal Trade Commission accountable by requiring the 6(b) study of drug middlemen to be produced within one year, instead of the typical three to five years it takes the FTC to do something.
I’ve also worked with the junior senator from Washington state to pass the PBM Transparency Act out of the Commerce Committee with bipartisan support.
The FTC can play an important role by holding PBMs accountable on spread pricing and clawbacks across all health insurance.
I’ve also contributed to and supported two Finance Committee mark-ups this year that included six of my PBM accountability and transparency provisions.
I’m supportive of PBM provisions that have come out of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee to deal with this problem in the commercial insurance markets.
I hope the full Senate doesn’t ignore the aggressive actions that four committees have taken this Congress to hold PBMs accountable.
We must enact these bold committee-passed bills into law. If we’re timid, we’ll be right back here a few years from now, still fixing the problem.
On top of PBM reforms and accountability, we need price transparency. So that brings me back to where Senator Durbin and I are right now.
With that background, I go to the purpose of this unanimous consent request on this Durbin-Grassley bill to bring important price information to the drug companies.
When patients complain about the high cost of drugs, it’s usually because they got their bill or found out how much it costs when they were at the pharmacy counter.
They didn’t have the ability to know the price before they bought it.
Knowing what something costs before buying is common sense.
So, working with the senior senator from Illinois to require the disclosure of a medication’s list price in advertisements makes common sense.
President Trump pursued this through regulation, and the Senate even passed this measure, as Senator Durbin has already said, a few years ago.
Each year, the pharmaceutical industry spends $6 billion in direct-to-consumer drug advertising to fill the airwaves with ads, resulting in the average American seeing nine direct-to-consumer ads each day.
Studies show that these activities steer patients to more expensive drugs, even when a lower-cost generic is available.
The Government Accountability Office has found that prescription drugs advertised directly to consumers account for about 58 percent of Medicare’s spending on drugs.
We ought to require the disclosure of this list price, so that patients can make informed choices when inundated with drug commercials.
Consumers and taxpayers would benefit from a dose of sunshine.
By passing the Drug-price Transparency for Consumers Act, we could begin the process of reforming the incentives in our prescription supply chain that reward high-cost drugs and their manufacturers, along with powerful middlemen.
If you watch these commercials on television, you see a lot of information very quietly stated by the drug companies: the side effects possible from using some of these drugs, you get information about what these drugs will accomplish, but you don’t know what they cost. That information ought to be available to the consumer.
Thank you.
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