US Lawmaker launches investigation into pharma pricing practices

pharmafile | January 15, 2019 | News story | Manufacturing and Production |  Bernie Sanders, Elijah cummings, congress, pharma, pricing, us politics 

Congressman Elijah Cummings has launched an investigation into pharmaceutical pricing practices.

The representative for Maryland’s 7th congressional district, on Monday requested information on price increases, investment in research and development, and corporate strategies to preserve market share and pricing power from 12 multinational pharmaceutical firms.

The 12 firms include: AbbVie Inc, Amgen Inc, AstraZeneca PLC, Celgene Corp, Eli Lilly and Co, Johnson & Johnson, Mallinckrodt PLC, Novartis AG, Novo Nordisk, Pfizer Inc, Sanofi and Teva Pharmaceutical.

The investigation comes less than a week after the Democrat representative introduced legislation aimed at lowering the price of medicines.

If passed, the three bills would allow Americans to import drugs from Canada, allow the HHS secretary to negotiate prices for the Medicare Part D programme and peg US prescription drug prices to the median price from five countries – Canada, Britain, France, Germany and Japan.

While Trump has made price hiking pharma firms the target of his policies since his campaign in 2016, Democrats have said the Trump administration are not doing enough to tackle high drug prices.

Louis Goss