Drugs don’t work if people can’t afford them. Big pharmaceutical corporations have raised prices so high that millions of Americans can’t access the affordable medicines needed to treat illnesses, manage their health, and take care of their families. Americans pay more for the same prescription drugs than any other country.
Background Resources
Our Partners
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What We Can Do
Create an independent New Jersey Prescription Drug Affordability Review Board to evaluate drug prices and set limits on how much payers, including state and local government agencies will pay for high cost prescription medications.
How Would The Board Operate
The impartial board would examine the cost particular drugs impose on the health care system and then set an upper payment limit that would apply throughout the state. The board will take a number of factors into consideration when determining if a drug price leads to “excess cost”, presents an affordability challenge to the state health system, or leads to high out-of-pocket costs for patients.
Who Will Make Up The Board
The Board will be comprised of 5 members and 3 alternates. These members will be appointed by the Governor, President of the Senate, Assembly Speaker, and Attorney General. In addition, there will be a 27 member Prescription Drug Affordability Stakeholder Council to advise the Board.
Why We Need This
- Drug companies spend nearly 80% of their revenue on things other than research and development. Additionally, drug companies have mostly stopped looking for major new cures, instead they have been more focused on tweaking patents of existing profitable drugs in order to extend their monopolies.
- Big Pharma will not stop selling drugs in the state. In fact, the generic industry has already argued in court that it is not possible to manage the distribution of drugs limited by geography.
- Reducing accepted fees will not dramatically reduce revenue to the point that will effect employees’ jobs.
- Blaming the supply chain and switching to a value-based system is not the answer. With a drug affordability board, rebates should become unnecessary and consumers won’t have to worry about paying exorbitant fees for a drug just because it is effective.
- Drug manufacturers will not be hurt financially by lowering the cost of prescription drugs, they already sell their drugs at different price points to different payers for the same drug. This makes American families pay more than what families pay in other countries.
Get Involved!
State Reform
National Reform
We support all efforts to lower the price of drugs for all Americans. Take a look at how our partners are lending their voices in national campaigns as well.