WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy, M.D. (R-LA), ranking member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, delivered remarks during today’s executive session to consider legislation regarding PBMs and generic drugs.

Click here to watch the executive session live. 

Thank you, Chair Sanders.

Before we proceed, I first also want to begin by thanking the staff both my staff, Senator Sanders' staff, and all of your staff as well. We’ve worked really hard. They've worked even harder. And I just want to thank them because I think we're going to come up with a product that although last week revealed how the sausage is made, and it's pretty messy, on the other hand, the final sausage is going to taste pretty good.

We’ve worked on a bipartisan solution to lower costs. I can say that lowering the cost of prescription drugs to families has been a bipartisan concern. And this is our mission. We're here to lower health care costs, to improve access to the best possible care for fellow Americans.

And the legislation we're considering today to reform the rules that govern PBMs and generic drugs does that. 

Now, PBMs have been criticized for their role in contributing to higher cost of prescription drugs, and they are a major player, middlemen between multiple parties, employees, patients, pharmacies, manufacturers, and others. And the current concern has been that  they've used this position as middlemen to pick drugs that serve their bottom line, and the patient and the sponsor pay.

But I can say,  I have no doubt that the people who run those companies are well-meaning people. And in my years in the medical community, I've learned that there are far more bad incentives driving bad behavior than bad actors. And those incentives are things that we're attempting to address.

The profit motive has played a major role in the creation of numerous life-saving drugs. But a market without transparency is dysfunctional. Patients should know what they're expected to pay and employees have the employers have the ability to shop around for the best deal. Today's PBM legislation is at its core about improving transparency.

One thing that we haven't really talked about, but one of the provisions in here would actually have a like cover sheet when you get a mortgage and you get a mortgage that tells you what your principal is, what your interest rate, how much ultimately how much you're going to eventually pay for interest. We have that kind of enabled here. So the small business that doesn't have the ability to afford a third-party auditor can look at that cover sheet and get a sense I can compare this plan to that plan to that plan, just as I compare a mortgage from this bank to that bank. A real shout out to Kevin Shulman, a Stanford M.D., who worked on all this. It was this suggestion, and it's just an example of how Americans around the country have kind of taken an interest in this and pitched in to make our product better.

And so we've got multiple drugs that are going to be lower cost generic drugs coming to market to prevent gamesmanship, to prevent abuse of the citizens' petition process, to speed generic drugs to market by preventing the parking of 180-day exclusivity, and to change the orphan drug exclusivity to align with the scope of FDA approval, which would allow more drugs for rare diseases to come to market.

You know, our colleague Angus King once said there is no silver bullet when lowering the cost of prescription drugs, but there is silver buckshot. There is a lot of buckshot in this bill. And the solutions we consider today are examples of how we can lower drug prices without threatening the incentives to produce the life-saving drugs of the future.

I thank Chair Sanders and the rest of you for your collaboration and I look forward to today's markup. Thank you very much.

 ###

For all news and updates from HELP Republicans, visit our website or Twitter at @GOPHELP.