Lower Drug Prices Now — Affordable medicines for all — no matter where you live, what you look like or what’s in your wallet
Whether it’s a sore throat, diabetes or asthma or cancer, we all deserve affordable prescription medicines to feel better when we’re sick. It’s time to stop drug corporations from putting their profits ahead of our families and our health. Together, we can end big Pharma’s price-gouging, and rewrite the rules so everyone can afford the medicines they need to care for themselves and their families.
No matter where people live, what they look like or what’s in their wallets, at some point everyone is going to get sick and need prescription medicines. Whether it’s a sore throat, high blood pressure or cancer, everyone needs affordable medicine to lead healthy lives.
But today, drug corporations and their powerful Pharma lobbyists are standing in the way of our health and economic security. By jacking up prices to boost profits, they are forcing people to make stark choices – like choosing between medicine and other necessities, or going without treatment, or going into debt or watching loved ones suffer without the drugs they need to get better.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Together, we can change the system to make sure everyone gets access to medicines they can afford. We are a coalition that has come together to fight for transformative, bold reforms through legislative, legal and executive actions at the state and federal level based on these four principles:
It is our government’s responsibility to guarantee that everyone in the United States, no matter where they live, what they look like or how much money they have, can afford the medicines they need to stay healthy and take care of their families. We oppose policies that put medicine out of reach for Americans or that deny or delay access to medicine for people in other countries.
Drug corporations and their lobbyists have rigged the rules of the pharmaceutical industry in order to drive up profits, putting medicines out of reach for millions of people. Their price gouging makes health and economic disparities even worse by putting the greatest pressure on the people who can least afford to bear the brunt of high prices. We must topple the barriers that systematically deny people access to medicines so that no one is left behind.
We must curb drug corporations’ power to extract profits at the expense of people’s health by harnessing the government’s power to improve patients’ lives. This requires a range of concrete steps that re-write the rules to rein in drug corporations’ monopoly power to price gouge; that requires the drug industry to negotiate fair prices with government; and that holds corporations accountable for practices that directly and indirectly keep prices unjustifiably high.
We as taxpayers help foot the bill for a substantial amount of drug research, development and innovation, for drug purchasing through Medicare, Medicaid, and the Veterans Administration and for marketing, legal and patent protections for drug corporations. We must ensure government funding and incentives prioritize medical breakthroughs that most serve the public good rather than those that primarily extend monopolies and increase corporate profits. Everyone wants proven treatments and life-saving innovations, but prescription drugs are useless to people who can’t afford them. We must change the system to make sure everyone can benefit from our shared public investment in new drug research and development by ensuring that medicines are affordable and accessible to everyone.
Several health care advocacy organizations, including Patients for Affordable Drugs and Health Care for America Now, are pushing for policies that will help lower the financial burden of patients. Both organizations supported the Inflation Reduction Act, a law signed by President Joe Biden that aims to reduce prescription drug prices.
After decades of prescription drug corporations price-gouging patients on some of the most commonly prescribed medicines in Medicare, today’s news about lowered prices through Medicare negotiations is a milestone for patients, providers and taxpayers alike. These first ten drugs chosen earlier this year for negotiated prices are among those with highest total spending in Medicare Part D and the highest out of pocket costs for patients. Thanks to Medicare negotiations being implemented under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, patients in the future will save between 38 and 79 percent on these medicines. When the negotiated prices go into effect in 2026, people enrolled in Medicare Part D are estimated to save $1.5 billion in out-of-pocket costs. If the negotiated prices had been in effect during 2023, Medicare would have saved an estimated $6 billion.
President Biden did what his predecessor only talked about: he signed a new law that finally forces prescription drug corporations to negotiate lower prices in Medicare after years of padding their profits by price-gouging consumers on everything from insulin to heart medicines. Medicare negotiations will save patients and taxpayers billions over the coming decade once the law is fully implemented. The new law also penalizes drug corporations for increasing prices faster than inflation and caps the annual out-of-pocket costs that seniors and people with disabilities pay at the pharmacy for the first time.
