Protecting future of medical innovation
In the United States, patients have access to 90 percent of innovative medicines — the highest percentage in the world, according to a recent RAND study released earlier this year.
Americans with insurance still face financial roadblocks to the care they need. High costs and access restrictions mean many patients end up leaving their prescriptions at the pharmacy. These challenges are especially severe for those with chronic diseases and in underserved communities.
Patients are in urgent need of changes to our health care system that will ensure medicines are more available and affordable to them. Unfortunately, the current proposals on the table in Congress do not address the underlying problems with the U.S. system and will not improve patient affordability; instead, they will jeopardize the United States’ global leadership in medical innovation and negatively impact patient choice.
If one of several key proposals being considered in Congress passes, the choice and access Medicare recipients depend on with their current prescription drug program will suffer. Congress would repeal a current provision in the Medicare law that protects seniors’ access to hundreds of health plans and the ability to choose the plan they need for their specific prescriptions. By removing this provision, the government will essentially be deciding which medicines a senior can access, not their health care provider. The freedom that Medicare beneficiaries depend on to select their medicines will disappear.
What Congress is negotiating today, including the Lower Drug Costs Now Act of 2021 (H.R. 3), would be adopting health care system practices used in other countries where the government sets the price of medicines, and reducing patient access to just 44 percent of the innovative medicines available on average in those countries. In comparison, in the United States, patients have access to 90 percent of innovative medicines — the highest percentage in the world, according to a recent RAND study released earlier this year. This reduced patient access would happen without improving the affordability of medicines at the pharmacy counter and without addressing the systemic problems that lead to higher costs in the United States. Ultimately, this dangerous H.R. 3 experiment would undermine the ability of American biopharmaceutical companies to invest in new research and development and irreparably compromise efforts to find life-saving cures and even new therapies to address the next pandemic.
At Boehringer Ingelheim, patients are our focus. As a non-publicly traded family owned company, we plan in generations to make decisions based on patients’ needs and for better health. This includes contributing up to 20 percent of our budget into research and development. This supports producing medicines that lower a diabetes patient’s risk of cardiovascular death or a patient’s risk of death or hospitalization from chronic heart failure, and enabling our scientists to research and develop medicines in mental health, including schizophrenia, oncology, and immunologic diseases.
To make a difference for patients, we need to focus on lowering patient costs at the pharmacy counter and work on much needed reform for the current high cost rebating system, ensuring that any discounts or rebates health care companies pay go to patients and not to insurance companies or anyone in between. A new report reveals that 59 percent of patients prefer to lower their out-of-pocket costs, not their premiums. Other recent polling shows a drastic decline in overall support for letting the government set prices for medicines once Americans learn more about the proposed policies.
Boehringer Ingelheim stands ready to be a partner in health care reform — sharing our knowledge and focus on the patient to help create meaningful results that will support both patients and innovation. Let’s work together to advance bipartisan solutions that lower out-of-pocket costs for patients at the pharmacy counter without sacrificing future treatments and cures or American leadership in scientific discovery.