Big Pharma Killed A Rule. Dems Can Run On Reinstating It.
Democratic lawmakers can champion Paul Wellstone's bill to reinstate a George H.W. Bush rule to prevent Americans from being fleeced on medicine we already paid for.
This article was first published at LeverNews.com
Democratic senator (and possible 2028 presidential candidate) John Ossoff has a solid video out explaining the link between legalized political corruption and high drug prices — and touting his work to end the ban on Medicare negotiating lower rates on a handful of medicines. That was long-overdue legislation, and now it’s time to go much further and do something that’s also long overdue: reinstating the drug pricing rule imposed by Republican President George H.W. Bush’s administration.
In 1989, Bush’s National Institutes of Health asserted the power to require that medicines developed at taxpayer expense be offered to American taxpayers at a “reasonable” price. The idea was common sense: If the public spent money to help develop a drug, the public’s return on such investment should be affordable prices for that drug.
Six years later, however, the Clinton administration bowed to pharmaceutical industry lobbying and rescinded the rule.
“The National Institutes of Health relinquished its right to require ‘reasonable pricing’ on drugs and other products developed in cooperation between the government and industry,” reported The New York Times in 1995. “The pricing policy had been opposed by business interests.”
Five years later, Sen. Paul Wellstone introduced legislation to reinstate the rule, but amid the usual lobbying onslaught and flood of pharmaceutical industry campaign cash, the amendment was voted down by Republicans and a handful of Democrats.
In the quarter-century since, there have been calls for presidents to use related “march-in rights” to license generic drug companies to produce lower-priced versions of medicines originally developed at government expense. The Obama administration rejected congressional Democrats’ calls to do this.
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