Lower Drug Prices Now believes that no matter where people live, what they look like or what’s in their wallets, everyone deserves affordable medicine to have the best chance at healthy lives.
Lower Drug Prices Now brings together a broad array of state and national partners to fight for transformative policy change that will finally ensure everyone has access to affordable medicine whether they have a sore throat, high blood pressure or an acute illness like cancer.
At some point, everyone will get sick and will need medicines and remedies to make us feel better or help our family members recover. Thanks to decades of taxpayer investment in research and innovation through the National Institutes of Health and research universities, many more new medicines and treatments have been developed to address a growing number of health needs. But medicines can’t work if no one can afford them.
Today, the drug corporations that control the production and flow of prescription medicines are failing families in the United States and around the world, putting their quality of life, economic security and health at risk in order to boost profits. These companies and their PhRMA lobbyists dramatically raise prices, forcing people to make stark choices between medicine and other basic necessities, to skip treatment, to go into debt for medicine or to watch loved ones suffer without the drugs they need to get better.
It doesn’t have to be this way. People from all walks of life–patients, parents, seniors, small business, medical professionals–are coming together locally and nationally to re-write the rules in Congress and finally hold drug corporations accountable for making medicines affordable for everyone who needs them. We’re pushing elected leaders to end the drug corporations’ monopoly control to set prices and keep them high, to require transparency for taxpayer investments in research and innovation of new medicines, and to stop the relentless price-gouging that has made Pharma the most profitable industry in the nation.
It’s time that we make democracy work for us by making sure our taxpayer dollars and our government serves public health and that the needs of patients are a higher priority than increasing the profits of big Pharma corporations. Together, we can do it and build a healthier future for everyone.
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.
