During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday, Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) spoke of his disapproval for the current pharmacy benefit management system.
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00:00I'm going to stay here until the end of the meeting, but just in case something happens,
00:07I want to say to all the panelists, as chairman of this committee, thank you for your time
00:12and hard work put into this. Senator Booker.
00:16Mr. McDonough, what happens when a person with a life-threatening disease
00:22cannot get access to a life-saving drug?
00:30Not a good outcome. Be more specific for me.
00:33If it's a life-threatening situation and they're not getting access to that medication,
00:38then the life is at danger. And you know situations, right? I do know situations.
00:42Where contributing to the death of an American, was their inability to access over time the
00:51life-saving drugs that they need? Or because of the process of being put into place,
00:55such as prior authorizations, that it wasn't done timely and the person stroked and died? Yes.
01:00So why are we calling this what it is? My friends across the aisle and others have called this a scam.
01:10Multi-level marketing is a scam. Internet people that prey on senior citizens, that's scammers.
01:19This is a level of corporate violence that is costing American lives a level of colossal greed
01:32at the expense of patient well-being. Am I overstating the fact, Mr. McDonough?
01:39No. There's situations like that with every pharmacy.
01:41Yeah. And so I've been in your state and I sat around a table of senior citizens
01:47who each of them told me stories that they rationed their drugs against doctor's orders,
01:55cut pills in half. What kind of peril does that put people in?
02:02They're not getting the medication they're supposed to be getting and it's going to be again,
02:05it's going to be endangering their lives.
02:07Endangering their lives. Because the desperate people in our country who have drugs for cancers,
02:15have drugs for heart conditions, have drugs for conditions that are threatening their lives,
02:23are put in the moral dystopia of having to make a decision that is not left to them.
02:32To ration drugs or not have them at all when they fulfill the prescription,
02:38when they can't fulfill the prescription from their doctor.
02:41This is not a scam.
02:43This is a moral obscenity and it's corporate violence.
02:48The former FTC chair, Lena Kahn, under her leadership, released an interim staff report
02:56that found that the three biggest PBMs, Caremark Rx, CVS, Express Scripts and Optimum Rx,
03:04marked up numerous life-saving drugs, thousands of percents,
03:09and many others by hundreds of percents, dispensed at their affiliated pharmacies.
03:16These drugs include treatment for cancer, HIV, multiple sclerosis, pulmonary hypertension and more.
03:22Shockingly, hundreds of times the cost of people just over the Canadian border.
03:28They made more than $7.3 billion in revenue from dispensing drugs,
03:33hiking up prices over the course of just six years.
03:37This idea of breaking up big medicine is not just about dealing with awful antitrust.
03:45And there are a lot of industries where corporate concentration has caused consumers to pay more.
03:50But in this case, it's not just causing consumers to pay more.
03:55It is, as your testimony has said, threatening the lives of Americans.
04:03PBMs are not the only contributor to high drug prices.
04:07But the vertical integration that's allowed powerful market players to buy other entities
04:11in the supply chain and steer patients towards drugs with higher out-of-pocket costs
04:16is causing grievous harms in a country, and it cannot be allowed to go on.
04:22According to the research of the American Economic Liberties Project,
04:25released on March 10th, at least 326 U.S. pharmacies have closed
04:30just since December 19, 2024,
04:33when Congress abandoned a bipartisan, bicameral PBM reform
04:38as part of the stopgap spending bill.
04:41So we know how to solve this problem.
04:46Inaction is complicity.
04:50There is nothing short of an evil going on in our country
04:54that is allowing millions of Americans to suffer under an unjust system
04:59that's hurting small business people with you
05:02that have a larger focus in life,
05:05not only running your business, but helping rural communities.
05:09Again, I've been in your community
05:10helping people get access to drugs,
05:14even when you deliver them in the middle of the night.
05:16This is wrong.
05:17This is unjust.
05:19This is violence.
05:21This is moral obscenity going on in our nation.
05:24We know the solutions.
05:25This committee has got to fix them.
05:28Senator She...