Pharma CEOs grilled by Senate over high drug prices, but point finger at PBMs
The CEOs of Merck, Bristol Myers Squibb and Johnson & Johnson faced a barrage of questions on Capitol Hill from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and other members of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee.
Congressional scrutiny of drug prices continued to heat up on Thursday, with three pharmaceutical executives taking the hot seat before a Senate panel. The CEOs of Merck, Bristol Myers Squibb and Johnson & Johnson faced a barrage of questions from members of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee.
“The overwhelming beneficiary of high drug prices in America is the pharmaceutical industry,” committee Chair Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., said. “The United States government does not regulate drug companies. With a few exceptions, the drug companies regulate the United States government.”
He focused on several widely used drugs, including blood thinner Eliquis from Bristol Myers Squibb, Merck’s cancer drug Keytruda and Johnson & Johnson’s arthritis drug Stelara. Although the executives acknowledged that list prices have increased, they countered that revenues have not and that more money is going toward paying rebates to pharmacy benefit managers.
“Will you commit today at Bristol Myers Squibb to reduce the list price of Eliquis in the United States to the price that you charge in Canada, where you make a profit?” Sanders asked the company’s CEO, Chris Boerner.
“Senator, we can’t make that commitment, primarily because the prices in these two countries have very different systems,” he said, adding that the company has paid “billions of dollars in rebates” to intermediates that “unfortunately do not go to lowering the price of medicines.”
All three executives praised bipartisan legislation advanced in the House this week that would delink PBMs’ service fees from list prices. If such a bill were passed, Boerner said, his company could “work almost immediately to begin to bring down list prices, and I would welcome the opportunity to work with this committee to do that.”
By the end of the hearing, none of the CEOs promised to reduce prices, and the ranking member of the committee said Sanders was wasting people’s time.
“I wish this were a genuine exercise,” said Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La. “I am willing to do the work, my colleagues are, too. This committee has devolved into CEO Whac-A-Mole with little to show. If this is just to get social media clips of members taking it to a quote-unquote greedy CEO, then I suppose that is what some people want to accomplish.”
Related: PBM reform: Key Senate committee advances legislation targeting drug pricing practices
Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at the research group KFF, said the results were not surprising, especially in an election year. “I would not expect the CEO of a drug company to stand before Congress and just all of a sudden give up millions of dollars in revenues and profits by committing to lowering prices,” he said.