by Kristi Dunn
Here in Tennessee, we stand up for what’s best for our communities and do what we can to encourage our elected officials to act in the best interests of our families and taxpayers. In health care, it often becomes convoluted and hard to decipher what will actually improve the lives of patients. When it comes to prescription drug affordability, prices continue to skyrocket and we need our lawmakers to do what they can to effectively lower costs and reject policies that will actually hurt patients and families.
The best way to lower costs is through encouraging greater competition and unleashing the free market forces that drive costs down. Unfortunately, the Left has once again decided to reject Economics 101 and push for the federal government to be placed directly in the middle of the prescription drug market. They have done so by falsely labeling policies targeting pharmacy benefit companies as a ‘fix’ to combat out-of-control drug prices.
There’s rarely ever a good reason to increase the government’s role in our health care, and in the prescription drug market, doing so would be detrimental to the savings that millions of Americans rely on. Pharmacy benefit companies – called pharmacy benefit managers, or PBMs – help reduce prescription drug costs for a whopping 275 million Americans, saving payers and patients more than $1,000 per person per year. This is done largely by applying downward pressure, again because more competition leads to lower costs.
So why would lawmakers target the very actors in the prescription drug supply chain that are proven to secure savings? Well, it’s so they can advance a nationalized health care system. Joe Grogan hit the nail on the head in a recent piece in the Washington Examiner:
“PBMs exist to negotiate prices with drug companies and manage drug spending for insurers and employers. The work of PBMs generates value exceeding $145 billion. To use what has become a dirty word, they are ‘middlemen’ — important intermediaries playing an undervalued role in the modern American economy. Sanders would rather place the government in this role.”
That’s right, Senator Bernie Sanders and his fellow ‘Medicare-for-All’ advocates in Congress want the government to dictate all facets of life. No true conservative lawmaker who values a free market and limited government intervention would play along with these schemes and advance these kinds of policies.
What’s even worse is that restricting pharmacy benefit companies risks greater spending for the federal government, and if there’s one thing today’s economy doesn’t need it’s more spending that will drive inflation even higher. For example, the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) found a proposal under the previous administration that undermined pharmacy benefits would have cost taxpayers $196 billion in additional spending in a ten-year span.
It seems pretty clear that targeting pharmacy benefits is bad news for patients and families who are trying to afford their prescriptions and make ends meet. It’s also bad news for taxpayers who would be paying even more as a result of policies that increase prices of prescription drugs.
I know the leaders we have in Washington representing the Volunteer State will make the right choice by rejecting new government mandates in our health care and protecting the savings that patients, families and taxpayers rely on.
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Kristi Dunn is a mother, health care worker, and activist based in Wilson County, Tennessee.
