Rachel E. Sachs’ testimony on reducing prescription drug prices

Chair Durbin, Ranking Member Graham, and members of the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary, my name is Rachel Sachs and I am a professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis, where my research focuses on innovation into new healthcare technologies, primarily pharmaceuticals, and access to those same technologies. I also serve as a Faculty Scholar with Washington University’s Institute for Public Health and a Faculty Fellow with Washington University’s Cordell Institute for Policy in Medicine and Law. I am currently the Howard J. and Katherine W. Aibel Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Thank you for the opportunity to testify before you today about the role of competition in making prescription drugs more affordable for patients and how this Committee might take steps toward solving these problems. All views I offer today are my own.¹

In this testimony, I will explain how existing law both keeps branded drug prices high but has also enabled the development of lower-cost generic and biosimilar competition for branded prescription drugs and biological products. This competition can be used to promote access to affordable prescription drugs, benefiting not only patients but also our public payers. However, I will also explain the ways in which existing legislative and regulatory efforts have not always succeeded in promoting competition and will offer a path forward for this Committee to examine reforms that not only encourage the approval of lower-cost products but also ensure access to such products through insurance coverage, physician prescription, and pharmacy substitution. I will also situate the recently passed Inflation Reduction Act in this discussion, as it is part of this tradition of envisioning market competition from generics and biosimilars as the primary tool to drive down prescription drug prices over time.

Read the full testimony here