Republican members of the Senate Finance Committee cautioned their Senate colleague about what they see as the drawbacks of the drug price control mandates in the Build Back Better Act.
The GOP senators said the proposal includes a number of drug pricing provisions that risk undermining biomedical innovation, exacerbating inflationary pressures, imposing payment cuts on frontline health care providers, and compromising the United States’ global leadership.
“Under the unprecedented and constitutionally dubious system of bureaucratic drug price controls included in the Build Back Better Act, Americans would see fewer new treatments and vaccines, greater inflation pressures, and reductions in health care quality and access for years to come. The bill would substantially undermine incentives for biomedical innovation, as unaccountable federal officials would compel a growing number of manufacturers each year to partake in a mandatory price-setting program, with non-compliance punished by an impossibly steep penalty of up to 95 percent on gross drug sales across all markets,” the Republicans senators on the committee wrote in a letter to their Senate colleagues.
U.S. Sen. Mike Crapo (R-ID) is the ranking member on the committee.
“We stand ready to work with the administration and our colleagues in both chambers and on both sides of the aisle to develop policies to help address the myriad challenges facing Americans, including health care access, affordability, and innovation. We must not, however, enable the unproductive and innovation-killing government price control mandates included in BBBA to become law,” they added.