Pharmaceuticals’ power needs reforms

The Arkansas General Assembly gaveled in a new legislative session last month in Little Rock, and members of both the House and Senate are working diligently to make our state a better place to live, work and raise a family. One popular target so far for legislators has been Pharmacy Benefit Managers. PBMs are designed to manage patients’ prescription drug benefits.

The sponsors of these bills and others have indicated that the primary purpose of these pieces of legislation is to ensure Arkansans have access to their medications. While this is a laudable goal, their attention is misplaced. The real culprit of drug accessibility and affordability issues is Big Pharma. It’s the unethical and anticompetitive practices of Big Pharma that need to be addressed.

The fact is Big Pharma has manipulated the drug market for decades and now enjoys unchecked power to administer a discriminatory pricing scheme. Central to Big Pharma’s drug market manipulation are drastic price differences between what individuals in the United States pay versus what individuals in most other parts of the world pay for the same drugs.

In a recent interview, President Donald Trump highlighted price differences for weight loss drugs between the United States, United Kingdom and Canada, specifically naming the prices for Ozempic and Mounjaro in London and New York and calling the discrepancies unfair.

Another pillar of Big Pharma’s tightly controlled monopoly is the utilization of shady tactics intended to prevent lower-priced generic and biosimilar medicines from entering the market. By law, newly developed drugs are given around 20 years where they don’t face competition, after which lower-cost alternatives are allowed to compete.

Research shows that when generics enter the market, the overall price of the treatment — both the generic and the brand-name originator — falls significantly. To delay competition and keep prices high, Big Pharma will often prolong a patent’s monopoly period by slightly changing the drug’s formula. And often they will simply pay their competitors off in order to prevent generics from entering the market at lower prices.

These kinds of distortions go against the free-market values that have made America the greatest nation on earth.

To be clear, these are largely problems that need to be handled at the federal level. President Trump has indicated awareness, and our U.S. senators are also no strangers to these issues. In particular, Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., has a history of taking on Big Pharma’s patent abuses during his time in Congress.

The time is now to overhaul Big Pharma and put an end to their egregious practices that are harmful to so many Americans.

Editor’s note: State Rep. Aaron Pilkington, R-Knoxville, represents District 45, which includes portions of Johnson and Pope counties. He is a member of the House Public Health, Welfare, and Labor Committee and earned his master’s in health care administration from UAMS. The opinions expressed are those of the author.