Being aligned for a reduction in health care costs isn’t a difference for North Carolina’s senior senator and the president, or even most Americans.
How to get there is another matter.
On the morning after a 30-day window was given for Big Pharma to begin reducing costs in part through a presidential executive order, Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., made a repeated plea for transparency, requested all parties absorb some cuts, and asked his committee chairman and all stakeholders to get into a setting other than limited questions and answers.
“In the same way that I’ve criticized my colleagues and the former President Biden for a 60% reduction in small molecule research, for using marching rights, trip waivers, everything else to solve this problem, I think they are wrong-minded,” Tillis said. “What is right-minded is to modernize PBMs, figure out what their value added is, determine how we implement price transparency, and then we will create something that has an enduring value for the only person that I care about – and that’s the patient.”
Tillis noted how even with past administrations, he was unable to get transparency from the largest pharmacy benefits manager of the federal government. TRICARE, he said, gave no more than a heavily redacted report.
“I can’t even get transparency from them,” he said. “I want to audit the TRICARE PBM – at least we can eat our own dog food, right? And audit our PBM.
“This administration, I’m going to try it again. I tried it with the Biden administration. Can we at least audit our own PBM in a confidential way, figure out what’s in the black box?”
Tillis began his time saying “everybody needs to get into the barbershop.”
“A haircut should be coming, but everybody has to be in the barbershop,” he said. “The question is are we going to end up with a haircut like Mike Lee’s or one like John Kennedy’s?”
Kidding aside, he offered a plan as he concluded his time.
“Sen. Grassley,” he said to Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, “I think one of things we should do outside of the structure of a committee, is to have a work group, get all the players to the table so we can have a good old-fashioned debate club versus the very limited question and answer we have here.”
Tillis said if Grassley was willing to lead he’d follow, but otherwise would convene it himself. He wants a comprehensive discussion “about how we fix the value chain and how we ultimately address this problem.”
Tillis said, “The most-favored nation coming out of the administration, and all these other things, are short-sighted, unsustainable measures that are not going to produce the result I do believe all of us on this committee want to achieve. It’s not the why, but we’ve got a very wide range of differences on the how.”
