By Kathryn Batts
As someone who suffers from fibromyalgia, I follow the policy discussions around drug pricing and ideas to lower patients costs very closely. Cymbalta helps me manage my symptoms and show up for the people who are counting on me and I want to make sure that I continue to have access to this medication.
That’s why I paid particular attention when I first heard about the “Most Favored Nation” drug pricing policy being discussed in Washington. Lower drug prices sounded like an easy win for someone who fills prescriptions every month. But the more I learned about how it would actually work, the more worried I got.
Here’s the part that doesn’t get talked about enough: in countries with those lower, government-set prices, new treatments often take years longer to arrive, and some never show up at all. When a government decides in advance what a company can charge, there’s much less incentive to bring new treatments to that market quickly. And developing a new medication is already incredibly hard. Most potential treatments fail in testing long before they ever reach a patient, and it can take years of setbacks before something finally works.
I think about that every single day. I’m still hoping for a treatment that gets at the actual cause of my condition, instead of one that just manages the pain that I am forced to live with every day. America leads the world in developing those breakthroughs, and patients here get access to them faster than in almost any other country. I don’t want to give that up for a policy that sounds good in a headline but slows down the very research I’m counting on to help find a cure.
If we’re serious about bringing costs down for patients like me, I think the real answer is closer to home. A lot of what I pay at the pharmacy counter comes down to how insurance companies operate. Pharmacy Benefit Managers, or PBMs, are the ones deciding what’s covered, what I owe out of pocket, and whether I can use my local pharmacy or have to go three towns over to fill my prescription. I’d like to see North Carolina’s members of Congress look more closely at that, instead of pursuing a policy that risks the research on which my future depends.
I want our leaders in Washington and here in North Carolina to hold insurers and PBMs accountable, and to push other countries to pay their fair share, rather than pulling our own system down to match theirs. I’m hopeful a cure is still out there. I just don’t want short-term politics to get in its way.
Kathryn Batts lives in Fremont, North Carolina.