Under Bernie Sanders’ glare, pharmaceutical chiefs defend their prices

WASHINGTON — The CEOs of three major pharmaceutical companies defended the prices of their drugs in front of the Senate health committee Thursday, drawing them further into a confrontation with lawmakers and the Biden administration over the cost of some of the most widely used prescription medications.

Lawmakers, including Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the panel’s chair, noted that the companies charged more in the United States than in other wealthy countries, accusing them of profiting at the expense of U.S. patients. The pharmaceutical executives — from Johnson &Johnson, Merck and Bristol Myers Squibb — conceded that patients in the U.S. paid too much but said that new medications arrived there faster than anywhere else in the world.

Sanders, an independent who has made reining in drug prices a signature cause of his late-career years in Congress, acknowledged that the companies had produced lifesaving drugs. But he singled out several widely used medications, including Bristol Myers Squibb’s blood thinner Eliquis, which he noted could be purchased for much less in Canada than in the United States.

“Those drugs mean nothing to anybody who cannot afford it,” Sanders said, adding that “millions and millions of our people cannot afford the outrageously high cost of prescription drugs in this country.”

The three executives who testified — Joaquin Duato of Johnson &Johnson, Robert M. Davis of Merck and Christopher Boerner of Bristol Myers Squibb — acknowledged that drug prices were often higher in the U.S. than in other wealthy countries.

At one point, Sanders, who accused the companies of using their drug profits to enrich executives and shareholders even as patients struggled to pay for medications, tried to solicit a promise from Boerner that the company would lower the U.S. sticker price of Eliquis to that in Canada. Boerner declined, citing the differences in Canada’s health care system.

The hearing took place as a new federal program authorizing Medicare to negotiate the prices of some costly medications is getting underway. Federal health officials last week made their initial offers to the makers of the first 10 drugs selected for negotiations, a list that includes Eliquis and four other drugs sold by the companies whose executives testified Thursday. Drugmakers, including all three companies represented at the hearing, have filed a flurry of lawsuits arguing that the negotiation program is unconstitutional.

As the pharmaceutical executives sat before them, lawmakers described anguished decisions that patients with high drug costs had faced. Sanders mentioned a woman in Nebraska who he said had died of cancer after she set up a GoFundMe campaign to pay for Keytruda, a blockbuster cancer drug from Merck.

At the hearing, the drug company executives blamed middlemen known as pharmacy benefit managers for saddling patients with high out-of-pocket costs. Those businesses procure discounts from manufacturers that reduce the bill for U.S. health plans and employers but not for patients. Benefit managers make more money when the sticker price of a drug is higher, but patients often have to pay more. Lawmakers have proposed making modest changes to the practices of benefit managers.

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