Issue 2 thrashed
Drug-price proposal loses by 4-1 margin
It wasn’t opponents’ 4-to-1 financial advantage that led Ohioans to crush a statewide issue Tuesday purporting to lower drug costs.
“Money doesn’t buy elections. People are paying attention,” said longtime Ohio political consultant Curt Steiner, who managed the campaign against state Issue 2.
“After taking a close look, they made a decision to vote no.”
Ohio voters crushed the ballot initiative by a 4-to-1 margin, handing a huge victory to pharmaceutical companies that raised a state-record-breaking $60 million-plus to defeat the proposal. The opponents had more than 79 percent of the vote with more than 99 percent of the precincts counted Tuesday
night, according to unofficial results from the Ohio secretary of state’s office.
Backers of the proposal said Ohioans will rue the day they voted against the measure, which generated seemingly countless TV ads over the past several months.
“Make no mistake, although this particular campaign did not win tonight, it is just the beginning of an awareness in Ohio about what huge drug companies are doing to our people,” supporters said in a statement. “This system we have for drug pricing in America has got to give, and sooner rather than later one state will successfully stand up to big drug companies and Ohio will wish it could have been the first.”
The Ohio Drug Price Relief Act sought to require state agencies such as the Department of Medicaid, retirement systems and prisons to pay no more for prescription drugs than the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, which gets the deepest discounts in the country. The VA gets about 24 percent off regular prices for medications, plus additional, secret discounts it negotiates with drug companies.
But Ohio voters simply didn’t buy it, as evidenced by comments at a Gahanna polling place.
“It makes sense to keep drug prices under control, but it seemed like there was some ulterior motives behind the people that were for it. So I was concerned about them,” said Brad DeLong, 55, of Gahanna, who voted against the issue.
Zeb Kromer, 26, of Gahanna, also voted no.
“I just don’t like taxpayers being held responsible for attorney’s fees and stuff like that,” he said, referring to a provision to require taxpayers to pay the proponents’ legal bills if they sue because the state deems the proposal unenforceable.
Supporters, funded largely by the Los Angeles-based AIDS Healthcare Foundation and its founder and president, Michael Weinstein, had portrayed the battle as a David-vs.-Goliath match-up and hoped voters would reject greedy drug companies.
They projected as much as $400 million in annual savings on drugs for about 4 million Ohioans covered by Medicaid and other state programs, a total that was hotly disputed.
Emily Resch, 23, of Gahanna, voted for Issue 2
because she’s worried about being able to afford her medications.
“We’ve had insurance problems, and just with the costs of prescriptions being too high and our insurance not wanting to cover necessary meds ... I have an autoimmune disease, and so we think that there should be more regulation on big Pharma’s prices basically. It’s basically price-gouging us,” Resch said.
Drug companies argued Issue 2 would benefit only a third of Ohioans at most, and likely lead to higher prices for everyone else — such as those with private insurance — because drug companies would raise prices to make up for the losses created by the initiative.
“Ohio voters delivered a loud and clear message that Issue 2 was a deceptive and seriously flawed proposal. A large majority of Ohio voters concluded Issue 2 wouldn’t have solved any problems; it would have made things worse,” Steiner said.
The defeat marked the second loss for Weinstein’s AIDS Healthcare Foundation, which championed a nearly identical drug measure in California last year that lost by 6 percentage points. He’s planning similar initiatives in South Dakota and Washington, D.C.