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WASHINGTON, D.C. – The U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions (HELP) is holding a mark-up today on S. 3315, the Health Care Cybersecurity & Resiliency Act of 2025. Senator Bernie Sanders has filed a series of amendments to the legislation, including to impose Most Favored Nation-style international reference pricing on prescription drugs. In anticipation of the hearing, the Center for Individual Freedom (CFIF) is reiterating strong opposition to and urges the committee to reject any and all amendments to impose such counterproductive price controls. What follows is a statement by CFIF Senior Vice President of Legal and Public Affairs Timothy Lee:
“The most foolish thing the U.S. could do in the effort to address drug prices is import other nations’ price controls by mandating Most Favored Nation (MFN)-style reference pricing. Doing so would capitulate to foreign free-loader nations by importing their destructive price controls to our shores.
“It’s beyond dispute that drug price controls depress innovation in foreign nations such as those in the European Union (EU) that practice them. That’s because drug innovation requires massive investments in research and development (R&D), often exceeding $2.6 billion to bring each new potential drug to the consumer market. Consequently, when foreign governments impose artificially low prices, they necessarily strip pharmaceutical innovators of the revenue required to fund new treatments. As a result, fewer breakthrough therapies arrive, and the slowdown in medical advances can cost lives.
“The real-world facts bear that out. Nations that impose price controls suffer from delayed drug availability and restricted access, whereas the newest and most effective pharmaceutical innovations typically reach the U.S. market first. Specifically, of 270 medicines introduced in the U.S. from 2011 through 2018, only 53% became available in France, 64% in Britain and 67% of them in Germany. Only 52% of that 270 became available to Canadians, 41% to Australians and 48% to the Japanese. If the U.S. were to adopt MFN pricing, it would foolishly import those foreign delays and access restrictions, in turn reducing American consumers’ access to cutting-edge treatments.
“Additionally, proponents of MFN-style international reference pricing rely upon the common fallacy that U.S. pharmaceutical producers can simply demand that foreign nations accept prices that will allow them to recoup the costs of research, development, production and marketing their drugs. The reality is that strict legal barriers prevent them from demanding price adjustment by foreign bureaucrats. As a primary example, European nations can exploit Article 5 of the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property by forcibly violating patents held by companies that withdraw their products from EU markets. Accordingly, pharmaceutical companies can’t simply threaten to not sell their products at the artificially low prices that EU governments seek to impose. If multiple companies attempted to withdraw, moreover, EU regulators would file antitrust complaints against them.
“A better option exists. Instead of importing other countries’ price controls, the Trump administration should continue using tough trade negotiations to reduce global drug pricing disparities. The U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) can pressure foreign governments to ease their price controls and pay their fair share.
“The effort to reduce drug costs for American consumers is a necessary and laudable one, but applying other countries’ price controls through international reference pricing schemes won’t end freeloading. It would reduce investment in R&D, thereby reducing pharmaceutical innovation, in turn suffocating access to lifesaving drugs and weakening U.S. leadership.
“The Senate HELP Committee should reject Senator Sanders’ amendments and any other efforts to impose innovation-killing drug price controls.”
CFIF is a constitutional and free-market advocacy organization with over 300,000 supporters and activists nationwide.
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