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Floor Speech

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Mr. GRASSLEY. Well, you just heard Senator Durbin say that this bill has passed the Senate once. It is still not law. We are back here again, and I hope my fellow Senators will see that Senator Durbin and I don't give up on this very important issue of trying to bring a dose of sunshine to the airwaves.

Lowering the cost of prescription drugs is a top priority of mine and most of the Senators here. Without prescription medication, millions of Americans would not survive. As a nation, we are incredibly blessed to live in a country where investment and innovation unlock cures and treatments.

But the escalation in price of prescription drugs, partly caused by this advertisement that goes on, are a consuming concern for millions of Americans, including Iowans who bring up this subject regularly at my county meetings.

I have come to the floor of the Senate to address the sticker shock that greets consumers when they pick up their medicine at the pharmacy or open their medical bills after a hospital visit.

In recent years, I have worked in a bipartisan manner to pass the CREATES Act, another bill called the Patient Right to Know Drug Prices Act, and another one, the Right Rebate Act into law. Each of these bills lowered prescription drug prices for patients and taxpayers by stopping anticompetitive practices, putting sunlight on medications for consumers at the pharmacy counter, and to keep drug companies in check.

I was chairman of the Finance Committee when we hauled Big Pharma in for public hearings. As chairman, I also partnered with the senior Senator from Oregon on a groundbreaking 2-year investigation of insulin pricing. That investigation focuses not only on insulin manufacturers but also powerful pharmacy benefit managers--PBMs.

I have worked to hold PBMs accountable by putting sunlight on their practices and working to ban their anti-competitive behavior that increases the cost to patients, rural pharmacies, and the taxpayers.

In this Congress, I have gotten passed the Prescription Pricing for the People Act out of the Judiciary Committee and with bipartisan support. I hope the Senate doesn't miss the opportunity to hold the Federal Trade Commission accountable by requiring the 6(b) study of drug middlemen to be produced within 1 year instead of the typical 3 to 5 years that it takes the FTC to do something.

I have also worked with the junior Senator from Washington State to pass the PBM Transparency Act out of the Commerce Committee with bipartisan support. The FTC can play an important role in holding PBMs accountable in spread pricing and clawbacks across all health insurance.

I have also contributed to and supported two Finance Committee markups this year that included six of my PBM accountability and transparency provisions. I am supporting the PBM provisions that have come out of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee to deal with this problem in the commercial insurance market.

I hope the full Senate doesn't ignore the aggressive actions the four committees have taken this Congress to hold PBMs accountable. We must enact these bold committee-passed bills into law. If we are timid, we will be right back here a few years from now still fixing the problem.

On top of PBM reforms and accountability, we need price transparency; so that brings me back to where Senator Durbin and I are right now. With that background, I now go to the purpose of this unanimous consent request and the Durbin-Grassley bill to bring important price information to prescription drug consumers. When patients complain about the high price of drugs, it is usually because they got their bill or found out how much it costs when they were at the pharmacy counter. They didn't have the ability to know the price before they bought it. Knowing what something costs before buying is common sense. So working with the Senator from Illinois to require the disclosure of medication list prices and advertisements makes common sense. President Trump pursued this through regulations, and the Senate even passed this measure--as Senator Durbin has already said--a few years ago.

Each year, the pharmaceutical industry spends $6 billion in direct- to-consumer drug advertising to fill the airways with ads, resulting in the average American seeing nine direct-to-consumer ads each day. Studies show that these activities steer patients to more expensive drugs even when a lower cost generic is available.

The Government Accountability Office has found that prescription drugs advertised directly to consumers account for about 58 percent of Medicare spending on drugs. We ought to require the disclosure of this list price so that patients can make informed choices when inundated with drug commercials.

Consumers and taxpayers would benefit from a dose of sunshine. By passing the Drug-Price Transparency for Consumers Act, we could begin the process of reforming the incentives in our prescription supply chain that reward high-cost drugs and their manufacturers, along with powerful middlemen.

If you watch these commercials on television, you see a lot of information very quietly stated by the drug companies such as the side effects possible from using some of these drugs. You get all the information about what these drugs will accomplish, but you don't know what they cost. And that information ought to be available to the consumer.

I thank Senator Durbin for giving me this opportunity to express my view on this piece of legislation. Unanimous Consent Request--S. 1250

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