Lankford Puts Pressure on Pharmacy Benefit Managers to Lower Cost of Rx Drugs

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WASHINGTON, DC – Senator James Lankford (R-OK), member of the Senate Finance Committee, today put pressure on Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs), the drug pricing middlemen, to lower the cost of prescription drugs during a hearing on health care costsand prescription drug innovation impacted by the Biden Administration’s Inflation Reduction Act. 

Witnesses for the hearing included Kirsten Axelsen, Nonresident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and Senior Policy Advisor at DLA Piper; Theo Merkel, Senior Research Fellow at the Paragon Health Institute and Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute; Judy Aiken, Retired Registered Nurse; Jeanne Lambrew, Ph.D., Director of Health Care Reform and Senior Fellow at The Century Foundation; Rena Conti, Ph.D., Dean’s Research Scholar and Associate Professor, Markets, Public Policy and Law, Questrom School of Business, Boston University.

Lankford has worked for years to improve healthcare access and pursue workable solutions to lower prescription drug costs. Lankford introduced the Ensuring Access to Lower-Cost Medicines for Seniors Act which would ensure patients can benefit from lower-cost prescription drug products instead of being forced to pay for higher-priced drugs solely because of pricing gimmicks used by PBMs. He called on Senate leadership to reform PBMs in an effort to reduce the cost of prescription medications and urged the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to complete its investigation into PBMs.

Excerpt

Lankford: The PBM piece is a piece that we brought up over and over and over again. This committee has spoken out on [it]. That bill has not been brought to the floor. It is a bipartisan solution to be able to deal with at least some of the PBM issues that are out there, to be able to try to give not just prices on ten drugs that the federal government selects, but to give greater competition on thousands of drugs that are out there. And so I think the solution doesn’t need to be doing price fixing on ten drugs, it needs to be how do we get greater competition for all drugs that are out there and to be able to push back on that. So let me let me just ask a couple of questions. Mrs. Axelsen, you brought this up several times on the issue of local pharmacies, of access points, and of also this issue about the PBMs. What is it that needs to be done specifically on the PBMs to try to bring down prices and increase competition for not only pharmacies, but for access for drugs in particularly to consumers?

Axelsen: I think a number of these policy reforms already are under consideration, but it’s ensuring that the significant discounts that are offered on these medicines are passed through in some way to reducing the cost sharing for patients. When a drug company goes to get access for a medicine, the incentives are not in place for a cheap drug to get access. A drug with a high list price and a big rebate is what can get access on a formulary. And those rebates are not always passed through to the patient at point of sale. They may reduce the premiums, but they don’t necessarily reduce the cost of the drug for that patient.

Lankford: And it’s been our frustration that we’ve not been able get that PBM bill to the floor actually. And it’s something that we’ve got to actually get a real vote on, to be able to move this out of this committee and actually to be able to get that moving, because there are a lot of our independent pharmacies and quite frankly, every single consumer, that will benefit from action on that.

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