Guest Column: Weiland & Samuelson Promote Prescription Drug Price Cap Initiative
By Cory Allen Heidelberger on 2018-02-02
TakeItBack.org founders Rick Weiland and Drey Samuelson combat the big corporate money lining up to defeat their prescription drug price cap initiative by noting that even Donald Trump thinks that reining in prescription drug prices is a good idea:
Run State Government More Like A Business and Save Taxpayer Dollars By Passing The Prescription Drug Pricing Reform Initiative
Rick Weiland & Drey Samuelson, TakeItBack.org
By Rick Weiland and Drey Samuelson
Guess who said this: “Drug companies are getting away with murder,” their practices are “disastrous,” and their prices are “out of control.”
The answer? Donald Trump.
Why? Because he knows that American consumers pay wildly disproportionate prices for Rx drugs relative to the rest of the world pays.
In fact, according to Reuters, Americans pay as much as seven times more than British consumers for the same top-selling drugs. Seven times!
And this isn’t just a price issue; it’s also a critically important health issue, as well. A recent study showed that 15% of Americans with health insurance–and 33% of Americans who didn’t have health insurance–cited cost as the reason that they skipped taking their prescription drugs risking their health. What was the corresponding percentage in Britain? 2%!
If this doesn’t break your heart, you don’t have one.
So, why are Americans in this unhappy position?
For one simple reason: other countries use their volume purchasing power to strike deals with drug companies for substantial discounts. We don’t do it in this country because the pharmaceutical companies—Big Pharma—control Congress, and they simply won’t allow it.
And make no mistake, with their power in Congress, they can stop it dead in it’s tracks and they have, time after time after time after time.
But the one group that Big Pharma gives a pass to are veterans. It benevolently allows the VA to use its purchasing power to get a 24% discount—and sometimes higher—for the drugs that it buys. Don’t get us wrong, the VA—and vets–deserve it, but so do ALL Americans! And that’s why we are strongly supporting the South Dakota Fair Drug Price ballot initiative, which mandates that the State of South Dakota use its purchasing power to buy prescription drugs (for Medicaid recipients, state hospitals, etc.) and get the same negotiated price that the VA pays. If the initiative passes, it will save South Dakota taxpayers millions of dollars—money that could either be rebated back to our citizens, or redirected toward needed projects.
The 22,000 South Dakotans who signed the initiative petitions knew that it was long past time to rein in Big Pharma.
Well, this is our chance.
One thing we know is that Congress isn’t going to act. A bill to allow Americans to purchase prescription drugs from Canada and other countries—at cut-rate prices— didn’t make it through the Senate. Thirteen Democrats joined with a majority of Republicans to defeat it 52-46 (and to his credit, John Thune voted for it).
Big Pharma simply wields too much power.
But because South Dakotans have the right to initiate our own laws (at least for now), we don’t have to rely on Congress or the State Legislature to do the right thing—we can do it ourselves.
Make no mistake; passage of this initiative won’t be easy. Big Pharma, sitting on an unbelievable vault of money (gleaned from us!), has spent almost $200 million to defeat two similar initiatives in California and Ohio. We know that they’ll spend tens of millions of dollars in South Dakota to attempt to defeat this initiative, too. In fact, just two Rx companies (one U.S., one foreign) already have contributed over $300,000 to the Big Pharma committee planning to defeat this citizen-led Rx reform effort.
But they’re not going to beat us here.
South Dakotans are simply too smart. For one thing, we start out with a huge lead: an April Public Policy Polling survey showed that the Fair Drug Price Initiative was favored by a whopping 80%-9% margin, so we know that South Dakotans want change.
For another, South Dakotans proved in 2016 that Big Money doesn’t rule the roost when we decisively voted down the payday loan industry’s sham initiative, and passed an initiative with teeth in it that protects vulnerable South Dakotans from these loan sharks. To put numbers to it, the pay day loan industry outspent reformers by a 16-1 margin ($1,362,000 to $87,000), and yet lost the initiative by an incredible 76% to 24% margin!
So, we’re optimistic about our chances, but no one should have any illusions that this will be anything other than a real struggle–Big Pharma has too much at stake to let this initiative pass without a fight. But we believe South Dakotans will see through their big money-fueled half-truths, and realize that it’s time to say, “enough is enough.”
Rick Weiland and Drey Samuelson are co-founders of TakeItBack.Org, a non-profit advocacy organization focused on using initiated measures to advance election reforms and needed public policy. Weiland ran for the United States Senate in 2014 and is a small business owner. Samuelson served as Chief of Staff to retired U.S. Senator Tim Johnson for 28 years.
