Proud to join Cindy Rosenwald in the Union Leader to outline why lowering prescription drug prices must be a bipartisan effort.
Granite Staters deserve commonsense solutions that make medications more affordable — and that means working across the aisle to get it done.
Everyone knows that the cost of prescription drugs is too high, often hundreds or even thousands of dollars a month for medicines that can literally mean life or death. Even so, many Granite Staters — a quarter of us — report not taking medications as their doctors recommend: skipping doses, cutting pills in half, or not filling the prescription at all. By so doing, we jeopardize our health and risk higher medical bills in the future.
High prescription drug costs are also a strain on insurance premiums, which have skyrocketed. Prescription drugs are growing very quickly as a percentage of our state’s total health care spending, rising from 19% to 23% of all health care expenditures in just a few years.
Who is to blame for the high cost of drugs? It’s easy to blame the manufacturers for high prices, but the answer to unaffordable medicine is more complex and has to include pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) as the middlemen in the market. This is a fast-growing, very concentrated industry with only three businesses controlling 80% of the prescription drug benefit market.
The pharmacy benefits manager industry has grown so quickly that oversight and regulation to protect patients and employers hasn’t kept up. We need to do a better job.
Fortunately, there is bipartisan legislation in the New Hampshire Senate to increase accountability, oversight and transparency.
We are working together across party lines to make sure PBMs have only their clients’ financial best interests at heart and don’t offer financial incentives to steer customers to pharmacies with whom they have ownership relationships when another in-network pharmacy might be closer. We’re also working to make sure PBMs don’t pass on extra costs to pharmacies. And finally, we’re also going to work to make sure customers are always told the lowest prices for a prescription, even when they forget to ask.
The rapidly rising cost of prescription drugs presents a significant threat to the wellbeing of Granite Staters. Solving it, as with all serious problems, will require bipartisan solutions. The problem is too big to ignore.
Sen. Cindy Rosenwald, D-Nashua, represents District 13. Sen. Denise Ricciardi, R-Bedford, represents District 9.