Healthy Skepticism Library item: 2197

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Publication type: news

Sanders's 'Reasonable drug pricing' amendment
BNA Daily Report for Executives 2001 Oct 15

Full text:

House-Passed Labor-HHS Spending Bill Includes Sanders’s Drug Pricing Amendment The House Oct. 11 approved an amendment to the fiscal year 2002 spending bill for the departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education (H.R. 3061) that would require drug companies taking advantage of federally funded research to charge the public reasonable prices for the drugs they develop.

The “reasonable pricing” amendment, offered by Rep. Bernard Sanders (I-Vt.), a long-time critic of the drug industry, passed by voice vote.

Last year, the House passed an identical amendment, but the amendment failed in the Senate.

Sanders said he would fight to get the Senate to pass the amendment.

“It is totally unacceptable for the taxpayers of this country to provide billions of dollars through the National Institutes of Health to develop new drugs, and yet the American people get nothing but higher drug prices,” Sanders said.

“If the taxpayers pay for the research into a new drug, they should receive a ‘reasonable price’ from the drug companies,” he said.

According to Sanders, from 1955 to 1992, NIH researched and developed 92 percent of the drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration to treat cancer. But, he said, once NIH has successfully developed a new drug, it awards the commercial rights to drug companies. Sanders cited the example of the cancer drug, Taxol. According to Sanders, NIH spent 15 years and $32 million to develop the drug, but its manufacturer, New York City-based Bristol-Myers Squibb, “charges roughly twenty times what it cost to produce the drug.”

Bristol-Myers Squibb makes more than $1 million every day on Taxol, Sanders said.

“This amendment makes clear that Congress will not stand by while the NIH turns over valuable research to the pharmaceutical industry unless the American consumer receives a price benefit as is required by current law,” he said.

Jackie Cottrell, a spokeswoman for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, a drug industry trade association, told BNA Oct. 12 that a recent NIH study provides “compelling evidence that taxpayers are getting a significant benefit from the relationship between industry and NIH.” Citing the July NIH study, NIH Response to the Conference Report Request for a Plan to Ensure Taxpayers’ Interests Are Protected, Cottrell pointed out that the technology transfer between NIH and industry results in “a payoff of 15 times taxpayers’ NIH investment,” including increased life expectancies for Americans and new advances in health care.