Something remarkable happened this week: You changed the course of history.
Because of you and this community of patients, families, and allies, Congress passed and the President signed into law historic legislation that will lower prescription drug prices for millions of Americans.
For the first time ever:
- Medicare will be required to negotiate directly with drug companies for some of the costliest drugs and use its purchasing power to get a better deal for Americans.
- We will curb price gouging by imposing a penalty on drug companies that raise their prices in Medicare by more than the rate of inflation.
- There will be an annual out-of-pocket cap in the Medicare prescription drug program of $2,000 when there is no cap now, cutting costs enormously for patients who currently can wind up paying more than $15,000 out of pocket every year.
- Medicare beneficiaries who rely on insulin will have their insulin copays capped at $35 per month.
Big Pharma — with more than 1,500 lobbyists on Capitol Hill — fought these reforms with all its might, spending at least $56 million on advertising and more than $100 million on lobbying in the past year. It lied about the impact of the legislation, tried to scare patients with dire warnings that new innovative drugs would not be available, and even directly threatened members of Congress. We overcame all of it because of you.
Our community and the American people rose up and said Enough! And finally, after years of effort, we overcame the most powerful lobby in the country. The legislation does not include everything we hoped for, but make no mistake — it changes the trajectory of drug prices and policy in the United States. It finally begins to break the power of multinational drug corporations to dictate prices of brand name drugs to the American people.
I cannot emphasize this enough: The victory would not have been achieved without tireless advocacy from people such as yourself. Your dedication to sharing your real, lived experiences and to write a letter or make a phone call made it possible to reach policymakers in Washington and counter the power of the drug companies; you are the force behind these reforms. Thank you.
We thank the members of the House and Senate and President Biden who stood with patients to achieve this hard fought victory. There is more work to do to lower drug prices for all patients, including many members of this community. Our work is not done, and we will not stop here — we will keep fighting for all patients whose prices are too high.
More importantly please remember, this victory shows we can make progress, we can achieve meaningful change to help millions of Americans. Together we will continue the work to reform our system in order to make it work better for the people it is supposed to serve — rather than the people who profit from it.
Thank you for being a part of this movement.
Best wishes,
David Mitchell