Senator Crapo works to lower prescription drug prices for Idahoans

TWIN FALLS, Idaho (KMVT/KSVT) —If you’ve been to a pharmacy for a prescription in the past few years, you may have noticed that prices for medications have gone up.

It’s not a recent issue but one that may have a solution in the future. That’s thanks in part to senate finance committee republican leader Senator Mike Crapo (R) who held a press conference in Twin Falls along with the pharmacy community and Idaho state Senator Julie VanOrden (R-Pingree).

The Senate Finance Committee recently approved Senator Crapo’s modernizing and ensuring PBM accountability act.

PBM stands for Pharmacy Benefit Manager, which are third party administrators of prescription drug programs for commercial health plans. Medicare Part D, and federal employees health plans to name a few.

Senator Crapo says, “This issue has been a huge issue in Congress for probably a decade and as you know we had a big battle last congress over whether to institute federal drug pricing controls- federal price controls- which is something that republicans did not support. So we’ve been working on the issue for quite some time.”

Something that’s grown extremely complex according to the Senator, who started working on this legislation over two years ago. He called the senate finance committee to all come together to work on it.

“We created teams, bipartisan teams to work on different parts of the issues and that resulted in 20 or 30 different bills and we have then been working on those to refine them. We have to determine the cost if any many of the bills we talked about today are actually saving money to the federal government, the federal treasury and to American’s, says Senator Crapo.

The proposals hope to mitigate misaligned incentives that drive prices up, prevent spread pricing in Medicare, improve pharmacy access, and increase oversight in the supply chain.

The Senator hopes to get floor time to present the bill before the end of this session.

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