Rachel Sachs, associate professor of law at Washington University School of Law in St. Louis and an expert on drug pricing, testified May 4 before the U.S. House Committee on Energy & Commerce about lowering prescription drug costs.
The hearing was titled “Negotiating a Better Deal: Legislation to Lower the Cost of Prescription Drugs.”
In her testimony, Sachs explained why comprehensive prescription drug pricing reform should include three particular types of policy solutions — and why drug pricing reforms that only include some of these policies may even exacerbate the current system’s problems.
“First, comprehensive prescription drug pricing reform should seek to lower patients’ out-of-pocket costs,” she said. “Second, reform should strive to fix the misaligned incentives in our existing pharmaceutical pricing and payment system. Third, reform should aim to address the underlying problem of the high prices of prescription drugs. There is no single way to accomplish each of these three goals, and different countries have chosen different answers to each of them. But H.R. 3, the Elijah E. Cummings Lower Drug Costs Now Act, works to pull all three of these policy levers to lower drug prices. Other congressional proposals do not.”
Watch the full testimony here.
