FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Doctors for America
PO Box 53313
1921 Florida Ave NW
Washington, DC 20009-9997
Contact: Candy Tai, Digital Communications Strategist
Doctors for America
[email protected]
(913) 276-4696 (cell)
Doctors for America Sends Key Questions on Drug Affordability to Senate Finance Committee to Ask of Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Nominee Xavier Becerra
WASHINGTON, D.C. – February 4, 2021. Doctors for America (DFA) has launched a campaign that seeks to educate the members of the Senate Finance Committee about questions that should be asked of Secretary of Health and Human Services nominee, Xavier Becerra, on the topic of prescription drug pricing.
The campaign is crucial to the work of the Drug Affordability Action Team (DAAT), one of DFA’s core workgroups. These key questions address the issues that surround the ability of Americans to afford and gain access to vital, life-saving prescription drugs and vaccines, including for the novel coronavirus.
Doctors for America urges the Senate Health Committee and Secretary of Health and Human Services nominee, Xavier Becerra to consider and answer the following questions:
- Will you commit to using your federal authority to lay claim to treatments and vaccines for COVID to ensure affordable access for all?
- Will you commit to any available mechanisms (e.g. march-in, Section 1498, DPA) to ensure that Americans don’t continue to receive a bad deal from pharmaceutical corporations that bar access to life-saving treatments and vaccines that they are true investors of?
- Will you ensure that NIH and FDA enforce penalties for failures and delays in reporting clinical trials results?
- Will you support efforts to ensure that Medicare and other insurers can negotiate directly with pharmaceutical corporations to lower the cost of all prescription drugs?
- Will you support offering a total of 5 years of exclusivity for all biologic drugs instead of the current 12 years that has led to exorbitantly high monopoly pricing for these treatments?
To coincide with the submission of these critical questions to the Senate Finance Committee, Doctors for America launched a social media campaign to highlight each of these questions and the actions needed to address the drug affordability crisis to ensure all patients have access. The key questions and information about this campaign can be found on the DFA website DAAT page at: https://www.doctorsforamerica.org/issues/drug-affordability.
About Doctors for America
Doctors for America mobilizes doctors and medical students to be leaders in putting patients over politics on the pressing issues of the day to improve the health of our patients, communities, and nation. We are 18,000 physicians and medical students in all 50 states. We practice and study in the largest cities and the smallest towns of America from New York City to Oklahoma City. We work in private practices, academic centers, community health centers, and government-run systems like the Veteran’s Affairs and the Indian Health Service. We are in primary care and subspecialties. Some of us are just embarking on their medical careers and some have retired – most are somewhere in between. Some of us are deans of medical schools, nationally renowned health policy experts. Nearly all of us take care of patients. Many of us have never ventured into politics before, but driven by pragmatic idealism, we are bringing the voice of physicians to communities across the country and to the national stage. Find out more at doctorsforamerica.org and on Twitter @drsforamerica.