Reducing prescription drug prices

Hi Everybody!

As you know may know by now, I was diagnosed with MS in 2003. This is part of the reason I feel qualified to talk about the need to overhaul our health care system -- because I live with its faults every day. One of the problems I see is the skyrocketing price of prescription drugs. Each week, I have to take injections of a drug called Rebif, which slows the progression of my MS. If I was not enrolled in the state health care plan, my prescription would cost me $1300 per month.

Last year I got a phone call from the drug company, letting me know that my co-pay had just gone up from $50/month to $500/month. No warning. If I wanted my medicine, I needed to come up with the money or go without.

We absolutely have to do something about the cost of prescription drugs.

Not one to sit around and wait for a solution (guess that's why I'm running for state representative), I've found a solution that , while not perfect, can provide a lot of help to an awful lot of people. And it is not a subsidy -- there will be some relatively minor adminstrative costs, but this isn't a big money program.

In simplest terms, the plan leverages the muscle of a state's Medicaid program to negotiate drug prices for a large group of the uninsured population (my suggestion, and the way they do it in Maine, is people up to 350% of the poverty level). The state essentially goes to a drug company and says, "Lower the cost of this drug for a defined group of people or we won't put you on our Medicaid program's preferred drug list, and you won't sell as much, and you'll make less money."

Pretty simple sounding, huh? Well, that is happening right now, with a couple of variations, in Maine, California and Hawaii. Millions of dollars are being saved by folks who most need to be saving that money. Every state could have done this years ago, but the pharmaceutical companies convinced states that they'd be sued and lose if they did it. Guess what? Maine was the first state to implement a plan like this; they were sued; and the case went all the way to the U.S. Supremen Court, where the plan was found to be legal. States can use their Medicaid programs to negotiate prescription drug prices. Simple.

Missouri needs to do this. Every state needs to, really, but I'm pretty focused on Missouri these days.

For more information, here are a couple of good links:

http://www.policychoices.org/reports/CutDrugCostsExecSumFINAL.pdf
http://www.drummajorinstitute.org/library/report.php?ID=50

Please, learn more about this program and tell people about it. If I'm elected, I promise I'll do everything I can to see that it becomes law. Too many people need help; we can't sit around and do nothing for them; Democracy is not a spectator sport; get in the game!

- sean

Sean Spence
Candidate, Missouri's 25th House District
www.SpenceCampaign.com
seanspence@earthlink.net
573-823-1308 (mobile)