House, Senate Dems introduce bills to combat 'abusive' pharma business practices

 In the aftermath of Congress introducing legislation allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices — which currently remains in limbo after the failed passage of the Build Back Better Act — some congressional Dems have shifted gears and have put their targets on other pharma business practices.

House Oversight Committee Chair Carolyn Maloney led a group of Democrat colleagues and introduced three bills on Thursday to target “business practices pharmaceutical companies use to suppress competition, maintain market monopolies, and keep drug prices high,” a statement from the officials said.

Sen. Debbie Stabenow, a Michigan Democrat and chair of the Senate’s finance subcommittee on health care, also introduced those same bills in the Senate with Minnesota Dem Tina Smith.

The three bills include:

The Discounted Drugs for Clinical Trials Act, which would go after brand name sponsors who restrict access to samples of drugs necessary for bioequivalence testing. The bill would grant certain researchers access to drugs or biologics for research purposes with a certain price cap: a maker’s cost to manufacture, maximum.

The Pharmaceutical Research and Transparency Act of 2022 would amend two currently-existing laws to have pharma companies publicly disclose their incurred costs to conduct clinical trials. The bill would create a public repository of cost data for drug clinical trials, would require parties to submit this cost data within a year after a trial is finished to that repository — plus report disaggregated costs in their annual SEC filings.

The Generic Substitution Non-Interference Act aims to block “Dispense-As-Written” campaigns, a type of campaign that the members of Congress called anti-competitive. It would make illegal certain practices that would require health care providers to write “dispense as written” on a prescription when a generic or biosimilar is available.

“These three bills target Big Pharma’s manipulative practices in order to strengthen competition, promote innovation, and increase transparency into research and development costs—all of which will help make drugs more affordable,” Maloney said in a statement.

Multiple non-profits and advocacy groups announced their support for the bills.

Doctors Without Borders praised the introduction of the clinical trial cost disclosure bill, while grassroots activist group US PIRG (Public Interest Research Group) health care campaign director Patricia Kelmar said that “these bills are a vital start to pulling down the obstacles to competition and bringing about needed reforms.”

https://endpts.com/house-senate-dems-introduce-legislation-to-combat-abusive-pharma-business-practices/