-9999
Floor Speech
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. DURBIN. Madam President, tomorrow the Senate Judiciary Committee--which I chair--will hold a hearing on competition in the prescription drug market and its impact on the prices that Americans pay for medication.
Patients in the United States pay the highest prescription drug prices in the world. Nearly three times what people in other developed countries pay for common medications and sometimes for exactly the same drug as prescribed in America. Take a well-known name, Jardiance, a diabetes treatment--you can almost hear the young lady singing the song, can't you? It retails for $700 a month in the United States. Do you know what the exact same drug made by the same company in the same place goes for in Canada? It is $150. Madam President, $700 for American citizens; $150 for Canadians for exactly the same drug.
What is the difference? The difference is the Canadian Government cares, and the Canadian Government started acting years ago to protect the consumers in their country.
The average new cancer drug entering the market last year had an annual list price of more than $200,000, and the prices keep going up. In 2022, drug manufacturers raised prices on more than 1,200 medications by an average--an average--of 32 percent, four times the rate of inflation.
For patients already facing a gut-wrenching diagnosis, the last thing they should have to worry about is whether they can afford lifesaving treatment. Yet 20 percent of seniors report that the sky-high cost of their medication forces them to skip doses or cut pills.
No drug is more representative of this problem than insulin, the life-or-death drug for those with diabetes. Do you know when it was discovered? One hundred years ago. By Americans? Not this time. Canadian inventors not only found this new, lifesaving drug, they surrendered their patent rights--the rights to control it, and their rights to receive profit from it--for $1.
Why? They said a life-and-death drug should not be a matter of bargaining, and they believe no one should profit off this lifesaving medicine.
When Eli Lilly launched its insulin product--Humalog--in 1999, a vial cost a modest $21, but over the next 20 years, the company raised its price more than two dozen times to more than $330 for a vial.
Thankfully, President Biden and Democrats in Congress capped the price of insulin at $35 a month under Medicare in the Inflation Reduction Act. It is unfortunate and impossible to explain--not a single Republican joined us in voting for this historic legislation to cap the price of insulin at $35 a month for Medicare.
Eight pharmaceutical companies raced to the Federal courthouses in the hopes of stopping another component of that bill, which enables Medicare to negotiate for lower drug costs.
Big Pharma participates in the Veterans Health Administration, which has the authority to bargain for lower costs for our veterans, thank goodness. They have had that authority for decades. Yet we heard cries of price controls and socialism from Big Pharma as they opposed letting Medicare simply negotiate a better deal on behalf of senior citizens and taxpayers.
Last fall, President Biden announced the first 10 drugs that would see price reductions from these negotiations. These drugs cost the Medicare Program more than $50 billion last year alone. When the President announced his list, I am sure many Americans already recognized the names of all 10 popular drugs. Why would we recognize them? Because they are the most heavily advertised drugs on television.
Here is a trivia question you want to take to the next party you attend: How many countries on Earth make it legal to advertise prescription drugs? Two. We know one; it is the United States. Anybody know the other one? New Zealand. The United States and New Zealand are the only countries in the world where you can legally advertise prescription drugs.
Americans see an average of nine drug ads on television every single day. By filling the airwaves with these ads, Big Pharma is inflating demand for the most expensive drugs on the market. Some manufacturers are willing to spend more than $100 million a year to make sure that all of us can spell ``Xarelto'' and ask the doctor for it, but they never tell you the price, do they? You see all those ads and all the information and all the gibberish they put at the end of it. Don't you think it is worth knowing that Xarelto costs more than $500 a month in the United States, when a generic or other lower priced alternative may be just as effective? That is why Senator Grassley, Republican Senator of Iowa, joined me in introducing a commonsense, bipartisan bill to end the secrecy surrounding drug prices in advertising. Our bill would require Big Pharma to disclose the price on the ad.
Incidentally, in 2020, Xarelto's manufacturer, Johnson & Johnson, spent $22 billion that year on advertising--nearly double the $12 billion it spent that year on research for new drugs.
Big Pharma will tell you that the high prices paid by Americans are just the cost of innovation. They point to the money they spend on research and development to create the next generation of lifesaving drugs. I want them to come up with new drugs. I want them to make a profit in doing that. But I want them to be reasonable in the process.
They always fail to mention one fundamental fact that we as taxpayers should not forget: Taxpayers fund the bulk of basic biomedical research through the National Institutes of Health. In fact, studies have shown that 99 percent of drugs introduced by the drug companies and approved by the FDA between 2010 and 2019 benefited from NIH research to get their start.
Too often, the prices charged by Big Pharma do not reflect scientific advancement; rather, they are the result of manipulation, not by researchers or doctors but by lawyers in the patent system.
Take the blockbuster drug Humira--at one time, the most heavily advertised drug on television. Its manufacturer, AbbVie, introduced the drug in 2002. For more than 20 years, the company exploited intellectual property laws to build a thicket of 165 patents.
The way it works is this: If you discover a new drug, you have a legal right to be the exclusive salesman of that drug during a certain period of time. If there is a variation on that formula on that drug, the patent time can be extended. So patent lawyers are always at work to make sure they extend the patent period of price monopoly for these drug companies. It is supposed to reach a point where there is competition over a generic form of a drug. The lawyers do their darndest to make sure they don't reach that point. The result: more than $200 billion in revenue over Humira's 20 years of exclusivity.
That drug is not unique. A recent study found that the top 10 bestselling drugs in 2021 had a combined 1,429 patent applications filed, 72 percent of which were filed after the FDA approved the drug for sale. These blockbusters were covered by an average of 42 active patents, blocking generic competition and generating windfall profits for the drug companies.
The Judiciary Committee has taken a leadership role in addressing Big Pharma's abuse. Last year, the committee unanimously reported five bipartisan drug-pricing bills to address anticompetitive pay-for-delay agreements, sham citizen petitions, patent thickets, and product hops, among other issues. This includes my bill with Senators Tillis, Coons, and Grassley to improve information sharing between the FDA and the Patent Office to ensure accuracy in the representations made by pharmaceutical companies to prevent gamesmanship.
Tomorrow's hearing is going to be cochaired by my colleague and friend from Vermont, Senator Peter Welch. He told me when he recently came to the Senate, replacing Senator Pat Leahy, that this was an issue near and dear to him. I assured him there would be a hearing on this subject because it is so important to the country and so many people have an interest in it.
I have been watching all those drug ads day in and day out like everybody else. It is time that we have the facts put in front of the American people instead of just the advertising and the jingles.
Our committee work is far from done. Tomorrow's hearing will shed light on additional obstacles to reducing drug prices and how our committee can help solve this problem for the American people.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Source