The days are numbered for the multi-billion-dollar, multi-decade rip-off of Michigan patients, employers and taxpayers.
Drug companies have gouged Americans for too long, giving insane discounts to the rest of the world, while we pick up the tab for every dime of research and development for the entire planet.
Pharma Fairness changes all of that. And it starts right here, right now.
The Problem
Remember when politicians in the 90s rode the bus to Canada to buy cheaper drugs and pledged to deliver savings for American consumers? Well as far as we know, they’re still stuck at the border because, 30 years later, nothing has changed. Pharma companies still have two prices: one deeply discounted price for the rest of the world, and one price for Americans.
You probably know someone who takes half pills or skips doses because they can’t afford a full dose. But they’re not doing that in France.
Someone in your family probably has high-deductible health insurance that forces them to pay full price for drugs all year long. No one’s doing that in Sweden.
You yourself might be buried under a mountain of copays. But some of your copays are higher than the full price charged to the UK!
The Math
Pharma Fairness commissioned a study to calculate how much Michigan taxpayers could save on what we spend on prescriptions for people with Medicaid insurance coverage patients. The study, conducted by Public Sector Consultants, says that taxpayers could save $800 million this year alone if we paid the same prices for drugs as the UK National Health Service. And if you compare our prices to those charged to the health system of Ontario, Canada, the result is almost exactly the same.
We can all think of ways we’d rather spend nearly a billion dollars than give it to drug companies who nearly give away the drugs everywhere else.
We could add a billion dollars to the school aid fund, enough to spend an additional $730 per pupil in K-12 schools.
Think of how many damn roads you could fix with an extra billion!
You could reinvest the savings in health care programs for the uninsured and disabled.
You could even do something unexpected like give it back to taxpayers!
Some Examples
It’s enough to make your blood boil! Compare the price Michigan pays for a dose of some typical drugs, to what other countries pay.
This is not a cherry-picked list of prices with eye-popping numbers. And it isn’t just American drug companies that are crushing us.
Foreign companies share something in common with American pharma: they treat American consumers as their ATM machines, as the rest of the world laughs in our faces.
Across the board, rich countries are getting 90% discounts compared to the prices shoved down the throats of Michigan taxpayers.
Let’s Make It Happen
President Donald Trump is the first political leader to do more than just ride a bus -- he’s issued executive orders and created real programs to save Americans money. And Michigan can capture these vast savings far more easily than you might imagine.
The President has established a policy of Most-Favored-Nation pricing, which forces pharma companies to charge fair prices to American buyers. He’s created a program called Generating Cost Reduction for U.S. Medicaid (GENEROUS) that enables state Medicaid programs to request a waiver from the Department of Health and Human Services to access these new, deeply discounted prices.
The deadline to apply for the waiver is July 31 of this year.
So far, Michigan seems to be sitting on the sidelines. That needs to change -- today.
If Michigan taxpayers demand Pharma Fairness now, we can end the multi-generational rip-off of our patients, employers, and taxpayers, saving hundreds of millions of dollars every year.
It’s Just the Beginning
The $800 million in savings is just for taxpayers funding Medicaid, the health care program for low-income families. That doesn’t include the savings that could accrue to patients paying for their own care, those enrolled in employer-sponsored plans, and those enrolled in plans under the Affordable Care Act.
If everyone in Michigan could access these savings, we might be enjoying a windfall of as much as $3 BILLION every year. So, Pharma Fairness for Medicaid is just a start. We’ll have more to say about how to capture these savings for everyone later.
Demand Pharma Fairness now. Let’s put the days of cutting pills in half behind us.