Wednesday, November 1, 2017

Tell your Senators to support the Medicare Drug Price Negotiation Act

Something very rare is happening in Congress right now: a real opportunity for a concrete, common-sense reform to bring down drug prices. We need to grab this opportunity while we can. Tell your Senators to support the Medicare Drug Price Negotiation Act.

Medicare, the country’s largest buyer of prescription medicine, is also the only government health program banned from negotiating its own prices. Pharma CEOs are laughing at us.

But that could all change with a new bill, the Medicare Drug Price Negotiation Act. It’s incredibly simple: the bill allows Medicare to negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical corporations, instead of being forced to accept whatever arbitrary price Big Pharma wants to set.

If we wanted to know what would happen if we changed the law, we don’t have to rely on guesses or projections: we just need to look at Medicaid and the Department of Veteran Affairs. Medicaid and the VA, unlike Medicare, are allowed to negotiate prices directly with the drug corporations. The result: those programs routinely pay much less for the same drugs than Medicare, often by as much as 73%.

It’s time to end this blatant Big Pharma giveaway. Tell your senators: this is pure common sense. Get on board with it now.

This isn’t a big, radical demand. It’s incredibly simple. And, maybe most importantly for your senators, it’s also one of the most popular ideas in politics right now: one poll last year found a whopping 93% of Democrats and 74% of Republicans support letting Medicare negotiate.

Universal healthcare will be a long, difficult road. But this? This is easy, it’s practical, it will save money, and it will have an immediate benefit for our senior citizens. It’s a no-brainer. And with a lot of senators increasingly desperate for a win as we approach the 2018 midterms, an idea this popular has a very strong chance of becoming real.

Join us in supporting the Medicare Drug Price Negotiation Act, and let’s start cutting Big Pharma down to size.

MESSAGE READS (personalize for more impact)

As your constituent, I know that 92% of Americans of all political persuasions support allowing Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices with pharmaceutical corporations.

The Medicare Drug Price Negotiation Act of 2017 introduced by your colleagues Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, Sen. Bernie Sanders, Sen. Patrick Leahy, Rep. Lloyd Doggett, and Rep. Peter Welch is a chance to fix this. I’m asking you to stop the empty rhetoric and start standing up for us by supporting their bill.


-John Sellers, Other98

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