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Rising healthcare costs are a top business concern for manufacturers, but price controls on prescription drugs are not a real solution for this issue, the NAM told Congress last week.

What’s going on: “Manufacturers know that keeping employees and their families healthy is the right thing to do for the workers who keep America and its economy strong,” the NAM told the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions last week ahead of a hearing on how Congress can make prescription drugs more affordable.

• “Manufacturers [also] know that ensuring workers have access to safe and effective medications is essential to controlling long-term health care costs. As such, the NAM has long raised concerns with price controls on lifesaving and life-changing innovations.”
• Importing foreign price control frameworks, such as most-favored-nation drug pricing mandates, “fail to value innovation, which creates uncertainty, reduces the number of available medications and drives up avoidable healthcare spending.”

Why this is critical: Price controls “would hinder the next generation of medicines from being discovered, developed and made here in America—and delivered to American patients,” the NAM continued.

What should be done: There are steps legislators can take now to lower healthcare costs for manufacturers and their workers, including:

• Reigning in pharmacy benefit managers;
• Reforming the 340B drug program;
• Expanding health savings accounts;
• Increasing access to telehealth; and
• Codifying association health plans.

The last word: “[T]hese policy recommendations … [will] ensure manufacturers can continue to offer health insurance to their workers and their families, who work hard every day to power the American economy,” NAM Director of Health Care Policy Jess Wysocky and NAM Vice President of Domestic Policy Jake Kuhns said.