Federal lawmakers are expressing concerns over high prescription drug costs — a problem they may have inadvertently contributed to, according to KRQE News.
In the past 13 years, Republican and Democratic-controlled Congresses passed landmark legislation that expanded taxpayer-financed drug coverage without detailing any strategies for handling drug costs. Instead, the legislation heavily relies on market forces.
"The history we see over and over again is that when the government steps in as a guaranteed payer without regard to price, it will be taken advantage of," said Peter Bach, MD, director of the Center for Health Policy and Outcomes at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.
While this government-sponsored coverage added more money into the market for drugs, new consumer protections hindered several mechanisms insurers used to control costs, like annual and lifetime limits on the dollar value of coverage, according to the report.
"Congress in attempting to expand access to prescription drugs has inadvertently created a situation where price increases are much more rapid," said economist Paul Ginsburg, PhD, director of the Washington, D.C.-based Brookings Institution health policy center and former congressional adviser on Medicare.
"If a manufacturer sets the price higher, there will be less resistance to that price because a lot more people will be able to access that drug than in the past. The rational thing for the manufacturer would be to raise the prices both of existing drugs and newly introduced ones," he said.
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