Apr 23, 2021
Photo: Getty Images
Oregon’s U.S. Senator Jeff Merkley and Representative Peter Welch (D-VT-AL) today introduced the End Price Gouging for Medications Act. This bicameral legislation would ensure that Americans do not pay more for prescription drugs than people do in other wealthy countries helping to address a top concern among Americans. The high cost of drugs forces many to face the impossible choice between managing their health or keeping their lights on.
The legislation comes as the White House prepares to release its American Families Plan the second plank of the Build Back Better agenda. Major health care reforms are expected to be incorporated into the package, and the lawmakers will be pushing to include the End Price Gouging for Medications Act as a part of that package when it moves through Congress.
Apr 23, 2021
Photo: Getty Images
Oregon’s U.S. Senator Jeff Merkley and Representative Peter Welch (D-VT-AL) today introduced the End Price Gouging for Medications Act. This bicameral legislation would ensure that Americans do not pay more for prescription drugs than people do in other wealthy countries helping to address a top concern among Americans. The high cost of drugs forces many to face the impossible choice between managing their health or keeping their lights on.
The legislation comes as the White House prepares to release its American Families Plan the second plank of the Build Back Better agenda. Major health care reforms are expected to be incorporated into the package, and the lawmakers will be pushing to include the End Price Gouging for Medications Act as a part of that package when it moves through Congress.
The delay will undoubtedly cost countless lives and risk future, potentially dangerous mutations of the Covid-19 virus. The AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine, initial tests showed, is far less effective against the Covid-19 variant that has spread rapidly through South Africa, for example. A prolonged pandemic will also threaten to extend and exacerbate a global economic downturn.
In response, governments around the world are considering a temporary exemption to traditional intellectual property rights in order to rapidly produce coronavirus treatments at low cost, a demand intensely opposed by American lobbyists for the pharmaceutical industry.
The push by foreign governments to unilaterally set the price and pace of production of coronavirus vaccines, drug lobbyists with the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, or BIO, argued, will place “American jobs and the workers who rely on them at risk, and impede scientific advances from reaching society.”