Good afternoon all, I am Janelle McEwen, an MSN, BSN holder, a registered labor and delivery nurse (RN) at Northside Hospital, Georgia. Today, I am here not only as an RN but also a citizen to request your backing in co-sponsoring and proposing the S.2543 policy titled the Prescription Drug Pricing Reduction Act of 2020, which has been introduced at the floor of the house and is currently placed on the senate’s legislative agenda order No. 225 (Kanavos et al., 2020). Presently, the U.S. prescription drug system is marked by numerous challenges, with the principal one being the exorbitantly high costs of prescription medications, mainly those providing limited value by both medical plans and patients (Mathis, 2021). Available statistics show that industrialized countries get reduced actual (net) and list prices for nearly all prescription medications and restrict the use of medications with minimal clinical impacts, leading to substantially lower spending (Mathis, 2021). Consequently, America alone makes up approximately 80% of all global pharmaceutical profits (Adler et al., 2019). Thereby, the above raises queries regarding our spending on prescription medication, and the unmatched high costs result in affordability and accessibility challenges that burden the taxpayers and patients.
The ultimate goal of the Prescription Drug Pricing Reduction Act of 2020 is to tackle the entangled challenges that characterize our prescription medication system. Revolutionizing the design of Medicare’s Part D benefit provides the opportunity to add beneficiary fiscal safeguards by amending distorted inducements that swell spending on prescription drugs (Kang et al., 2019b). In particular, the legislation will create an approximately $3,100 OOP limit on drug expenses, which will be a prized consumer safeguard (Mathis, 2021). The policy’s benefit restructure entails components targeted at reducing fees for expensive medications, including decreasing the amount of federal reinsurance paid to Part D plans for high-cost patients and mandating brand drug companies to pay a novel 20% rebate off the list costs for medications used by beneficiaries who have attained their OOP cap instead of the 70% refund presently needed in the Medicare Part D coverage gap (Rome & Kesselheim, 2021). Besides, your support of the bill would decrease the Part D premiums by approximately $6 billion, the beneficiary cost-sharing in Part D by nearly $25 billion, and deficits by >$100 billion over the next decade as approximated by the Congressional Budget Office (Adler et al., 2019). Therefore, kindly join the >70% of the U.S. citizens supporting the lowering the cost of prescription drugs and co-sponsor the PDRPA bill.
References
Adler, L., Ginsburg, P., & Lieberman, S. (2019, October 3). Understanding the bipartisan Senate Finance prescription drug reform package. USC Brookings. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/usc-brookings-schaeffer-on-health-policy/2019/10/03/understanding-the-bipartisan-senate-finance-prescription-drug-reform-package/ Legislation Grid and Testimony/Advocacy Statement Assignment Example
S.2543 – 116th Congress (2019-2020): Prescription Drug Pricing Reduction Act of 2019, (2019) (testimony of Chuck Grassley). https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/2543
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