Oregon bill to curb prescription drug prices moves forward

HB 2387, which advanced out of committee in Salem on Tuesday’s deadline day, addresses the rising costs of prescription drugs. Specifically, it would require the manufacturer to reimburse you for the cost of drugs that exceed a specified threshold.

The Oregon House Health Care Committee voted Tuesday to approve the measure, sending it on to the Joint Committee on Ways and Means.

It would limit the amount consumers pay out of pocket for a prescription, capping it at either $100 or $250, depending on their insurance plan.

It also would create a “premium protection plan” to ensure rebates benefit consumers, not insurance companies, and require transparency on drug company research and development costs, as well as advertising and operating costs and profits, with a goal that consumers could better understand drug costs and pricing.

The idea is that the price of drugs have become just about as important as their effects.

“In discharging patients from a hospital, we hand out many prescriptions in a day,” St. Charles Bend emergency nurse John Nangle said Tuesday. “Hundreds. And the first thing consumers ask is — ‘how much is this going to cost me?'”

But state Rep. Knute Buehler, R-Bend, an orthopedic surgeon, voted against the bill, citing an article that notes the entire health care system needs to be overhauled before we implement new regulations like price control systems.

That didn’t set well with Nangle: “It’s very disappointing that Rep. Buehler would vote no on this bill, knowing that it will immediately reduce out-of-pocket costs and create transparency in a multi-billion dollar industry.”

Another argument against the bill is that in Oregon, brand-name and generic prescription drugs account for about 1 percent of the total amount the state spends on all expenditures and for 4.15 percent of health care expenditures for Medicaid beneficiaries.

A letter to the Oregon Legislature from the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America brought up that the latest amendments to the bill expressly acknowledge that a purpose of the program is to reduce the burden on insurers in this state of the excessive costs of prescription drugs.

It went on to say the amendments eliminate the requirement originally in the bill that insurers contact each enrollee in the course of treatment before removing his or her drug from being covered.

At a hearing last month on the bill, The Register-Guard reported, Buehler said he agreed that “excessive profits” in pharmaceuticals “need to be fixed,” but added, “Good intentions aren’t enough. Price controls (on prescriptions) are like heroin. The first dose feels great … but the market will always find a way around those controls.”