December 12, 2019 Press Releases

McSally Sides With Corporate Backers On Medicare Negotiation For Lowering Drug Prices

On Medicare Negotiation To Lower Drug Prices, McSally Sides With Pharma-Linked Corporate Interests Backing Her Campaign 

The pharma-linked U.S. Chamber of Commerce is campaigning against reforms to lower the cost of prescription drugs, including Medicare price negotiation

The same group has also announced nearly $1 million to boost McSally’s 2020 election

 

PHOENIX — Martha McSally and a pharma-linked corporate interest group spending nearly $1 million to keep her in the U.S. Senate are aligned in their opposition to letting Medicare negotiate for lower prescription drug costs — a key reform that’s part of H.R. 3, which was today passed in the U.S. House of Representatives.

At a time when 24% of Americans “say it is difficult to afford their prescription drugs” — and when “[m]ore than 3,400 drugs have boosted their prices in the first six months of 2019” — the proposal is estimated to help bring down net pricing for certain treatments by “by thousands per month” by empowering Medicare to negotiate for lower drug prices.

Who would oppose such a thing?

For one: the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a Big Pharma-linked corporate interest group that has already announced nearly $1 million in TV ads to support Martha McSally’s 2020 campaign.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is publicly campaigning against H.R. 3 and Medicare drug price negotiation. The groups says that it “strongly opposes” the measure, which it claims sets a “dangerous precedent.”

Martha McSally — like her corporate backers — opposes Medicare drug price negotiation, which is bad for Arizonans, but great news for health care and pharmaceutical corporations that profit off jacking up prices without consequences.

It’s not the first time that Martha McSally has staked out a position that’s a giveaway to her pharma backers: The McSally-backed 2017 GOP tax law was a massive giveaway to Big Pharma — so large, that just 4 pharmaceutical corporations keeping an extra “$7 billion in tax savings in 2018 due to” the measure.