Earlier this month, the president signed into law significant new mandates on employers and pharmacy benefit managers – full PBM transparency, full rebate pass-through, Medicare delinking. These were big wins for the big drugmakers who’ve long invested heavily in diverting attention away from their role in the ridiculous prices charged for prescription drugs in America.

While the PBM reform was significant, patients and employers won’t see real drug price relief until manufacturers are held accountable for the way they game the system to block competition and keep prices high. As part of a hearing on affordability this week at the House Energy and Commerce Committee, PCMA laid out several important areas that demand lawmaker attention. At their core is stopping Big Pharma’s war against lower-cost medicines. When there is competition among drugs, prices come tumbling down. Which is why drugmakers employ so many shifty tactics to block generic and biosimilar medicines from coming to market.

As the Washington Post noted, Big Pharma “dodged a bullet” at the recent hearing, but the industry will no longer be able to hide behind the need for PBM reform. Here are some things Congress can do to rein in drugmaker tactics and bring drug prices down.

• Stop patent abuse. Drugmakers block competition by gaming the system to extend monopoly pricing well beyond their products’ original patent expiration. For example:
  • Pay-for-delay deals, where companies pay for potential generic competitors to postpone entering the market so they can continue to charge high prices for longer.
  • Patent thickets, where they file numerous overlapping patents around a single drug, making it extremely difficult for generic drugs to enter the market.
• Reserve market exclusivity for true innovation. Addressing extended exclusivity periods for biologics and orphan indications will speed up competition.
• Ensure that drugs can compete fairly. Preventing practices like “shadow pricing” and abuses of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s citizen petition process will improve the competitive market.
• Promote generic and biosimilar competition. Congress should eliminate regulatory obstacles to bringing safe medicines to market.
• • This includes removing the barriers to interchangeability designation which hold back biosimilar substitution.

There is much more than can be done, and others in the drug supply chain are worthy of scrutiny, but these solutions are important steps to promoting healthy competition and ending the days of drugmakers ripping off patients and employers with impunity.