WASHINGTON/NEW YORK--Hillary Clinton said on Friday that if elected to the White House she would create an oversight panel to protect U.S. consumers from large price hikes on long-available, lifesaving drugs and to import alternative treatments if necessary, adding to her pledges to rein in overall drug prices.
Clinton, the Democratic presidential candidate, would seek to give the panel an "aggressive new set of enforcement tools," including the ability to levy fines and impose penalties on manufacturers when there has been an "unjustified, outlier price increase" on a long-available or generic drug, her campaign said.
"Over the past year, we've seen far too many examples of drug companies raising prices excessively for long-standing, life-saving treatments with little or no new innovation or R&D," Clinton said in a statement.
If Clinton defeats Republican rival Donald Trump in the Nov. 8 election, she would need the support of the U.S. Congress to implement key measures of her proposal, which follows a broader plan to rein in drug prices that she announced a year ago. Even though her latest plan would likely affect a small number of companies, it could be difficult to get Republican lawmakers on board, Morningstar analyst Damien Conover said, adding that a "Republican Congress would push back hard on this.”
Clinton's campaign cited Turing Pharmaceuticals LLC's raising the price of its AIDS drug Daraprim (pyrimethamine) and Mylan NV’s repeated steep price increases on EpiPen for severe allergy sufferers as “troubling” examples of price hikes that have attracted bipartisan congressional scrutiny. Conover said Clinton's plan to address unjustified price hikes is less of a concern to the drug industry than her pledge last year to reduce drug prices overall. Drugmakers have said that lowering or limiting drug prices would hamper their ability to invest in research and lead to fewer new therapies.
The ARCA Pharmaceutical Index of large U.S. and European drugmakers rose 0.30 percent on Friday, in line with gains for the broad stock market. Shares of Mylan fell 4.6 percent to $40.00 on the Nasdaq. The Nasdaq biotech index slipped 0.40 percent. The decline was slight compared to the more than 4.7 percent drop in the index seen on Sept. 21, 2015, when Clinton blasted "price gouging" in the specialty drug market on Twitter, responding to reports that Turing had acquired Daraprim, an older antibiotic, and then hiked its price by 5,000 percent.
Soon afterward, Clinton presented a general plan to lower prescription drug costs, including allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices and demand higher rebates for prescription drugs. Her plan would also include caps on monthly and annual out-of-pocket costs for patients with chronic or serious health conditions. It aims to prohibit manufacturers from paying generic drugmakers to delay launching their cheaper products, and would eliminate corporate writeoffs for direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising.
