NEW YORK–(ENEWSPF)–September 4, 2016. Amid the outrage over Mylan’s price hike of life-saving EpiPens, Hillary Clinton yesterday announced a new plan to protect Americans from unjustified price hikes of long-available prescription drugs with limited competition. The proposal includes a new set of strong tools that will let the government take effective action in cases where public health is put at risk by an unjustified, outlier price increase like EpiPens.
Elected officials and health care stakeholders from around the country praised the plan:
“Hillary Clinton has been on the forefront of the fight to lower prescription drug prices throughout her campaign,” Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) said. “In this latest plan, she is proposing a kind of SWAT team to catch egregious price hikes before they reach a crisis point. We need a partner like Hillary Clinton in the White House who will support commonsense legislation — like my bills that would expand importation, enhance competition, and improve access to generics — and will help ensure American consumers are protected from rising prices of prescription drugs.”
“Hillary has been fighting for children and families for her entire career,” Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said. “I have been proud to wage these battles alongside her, and to be standing by her side now taking on price gouging by massive pharmaceutical companies. We have a drug pricing problem in our country. Hillary’s plan to protect against unjustifiable price hikes will help put essential medicines back in reach for American families — and could literally save lives. I wholeheartedly concur with Hillary’s approach to combating monopolistic pricing by boosting the development of competing drugs and taking enforcement action against price gouging. And when she reaches the White House, I look forward to helping her carry out this plan, and working towards the same goal in Congress: ensuring that life-saving medication is affordable to all families who need it.”
“Innovations in the pharmaceutical industry have brought life-saving treatments to patients,” Representative Gene Green (D-Tex.) said. “But too often, high prices have put undue strain on families budgets and sometimes, put drugs out of reach. We need a system that incentivizes and rewards cutting edge research and development, but also addresses failures of the market to set and keep prices at a reasonable level. Price increases on a long-available product that cannot be justified by any additional value or improvement for patients is a troubling trend. I look forward to working with Secretary Clinton when she is President to enact reforms and foster competition that will help Americans access life-saving treatments at an affordable price.”
“This is a bold plan that takes into account the needs of patients and healthcare providers while also being realistic about what businesses can do,” Representative Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) said. “Recently, prescription drug pricing has reached unjustifiable heights in some cases, including the most recent hikes in the cost of the EpiPen. I particularly appreciate Hillary Clinton’s commitment to ensuring strong oversight with aggressive new enforcement tools to prevent outlier price increases that have no basis but a drive for profit.”
“It’s good news that Hillary Clinton is willing to call out bad corporate actors and challenge powerful industries like the big pharmaceutical companies,” Adam Green, co-founder of Progressive Change Campaign Committee said. “This is a continuation of the type of boldness we have seen in other areas such as promising to break up Too Big To Fail banks, pass a public option to challenge big insurance companies, expand Social Security, and let students graduate college debt free.”
“We applaud Hillary Clinton’s bold leadership in fighting back against pharmaceutical corporations’ shameless and utterly unjustified price increases for prescription drugs,” Alex Lawson, Executive Director of Social Security Works said. “Her plan would reshape a system that is currently rigged against the American people and in favor of drug corporations.”
“Hillary Clinton’s new plan to combat unfair, unjustified prescription drug price hikes is a win for seniors and consumers,” Richard Fiesta, Executive Director of the Alliance for Retired Americans said. “When a pharmaceutical corporation decides to pad its profit by exponentially raising prices on medicines that have been on the market for years, retirees are the first victims and the hardest hit. These corporations know that seniors need these drugs to stay alive, and don’t care if people are forgoing food or other necessities to pay for them. It’s time to level the playing field. By directing the government to take swift action against unfair and monopolistic business practices, the Clinton plan helps both seniors and taxpayers. We strongly support this proposal.”
“The National Committee’s members and supporters applaud Hillary Clinton’s plan to create a consumer response team to identify and intervene in cases where drug manufacturers are hiking costs without justification,” Max Richtman, President/CEO of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare said. “For too long America’s drug industry has been allowed to raise prices excessively for treatments that have been available for years. The recent EpiPen 400% price hike is just the latest example of companies putting profits ahead of patients. The sky-rocketing cost of prescription drugs is hurting average Americans, our health system and the federal budget. This growing trend is especially harmful for seniors who spend a higher percentage of their income on healthcare costs and have seen their prescription drug costs grow exponentially in recent years. The Medicare Trustees report out-of-pocket costs, premiums and cost-sharing consumes 23 percent of the average Social Security check. This trend is devastating for America’s seniors. This move, combined with Clinton’s early proposal to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices and demand higher rebates for beneficiaries are important proposals which could make a real difference in the fiscal and physical health of millions of American seniors.”
Source: http://hillaryclinton.com
