‘Colossal Greed At The Expense Of Patient Well-Being’: Cory Booker Sounds Alarms On ‘Unjust’ PBM System

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During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday, Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) spoke of his disapproval for the current pharmacy benefit management system.

Transcript

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...

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