Substance Use-Disorder Prevention That Promotes Opioid Recovery and Treatment for Patients and Communities Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. CASSIDY. Madam President, I speak as a Senator who is also a physician. In my medical practice, I have learned that if the patient has the power, then the patient can make the wisest decision both for her health and for her pocketbook.

I am here to support the Patient Right to Know Drug Prices Act, which is legislation that has been put forward by my colleagues Senators Collins and McCaskill and which I am privileged to cosponsor.

Right now, our healthcare system is designed, if you will, to shake as much money as possible out of the patient and out of the taxpayer-- all to the benefit of others but not to the patient and not to the taxpayer. One of the most egregious examples is the pharmacy gag clause. With a pharmacy gag clause, when at the pharmacy, if it will be cheaper for you to pay cash for the drug as opposed to through your insurance deductible, the pharmacist, through his contract, may be restricted from telling you that. If the pharmacist does tell you that, the pharmacist will lose his contract with the pharmacy benefit manager. So you will pay more by paying your insurance deductible instead of less by paying cash for the drug. That money is taken away from you and is given to the pharmacy benefit manager. That is wrong. This bill, the Patient Right to Know Drug Prices Act, gives that power to the pharmacists and to the patients to come up with a solution that will be best for the patients' health and their pocketbooks.

By the way, it does more than that. It also requires that biologic and biosimilar drug manufacturers report potential pay-to-delay agreements to the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice, as is currently done with small molecule grams and generic manufacturers. This will allow biosimilars to get to the market sooner--again, saving the patient money and saving the taxpayer money.

Yet there will be an amendment put forward that will dilute the impact of this bill and will restrict the provisions of this bill to those plans that are self-insured.

I will point out that the three largest pharmacy benefit managers control 72 percent of the market for drug distribution--multibillion- dollar corporations that operate across all States.

It clearly falls within Congress's purview, as it regulates interstate commerce, to pass a bill such as that. In defeating this bill or in watering it down, it is, again, one more way to take power away from patients and money away from patients and from taxpayers to the benefit not of the patient and her health and her pocketbook but of the large PBM.

The Patient Right to Know Drug Prices Act is a key step in our fight to lower drug costs for patients. I ask my colleagues to support this bipartisan legislation, which will give patients the power to save money on their prescriptions, and to support the bill as is.

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