E-Paper
'Lower drug costs': Pfizer CEO asks Joe Biden to form coalition
There’s a great opportunity for Biden to take the initiative to “reduce significantly the cost of medicines for the patients, which is the thing that is now problematic,” Bourla said in an interview Friday with David Westin on Bloomberg Television’s “Balance of Power” show.
Pfizer Inc. Chief Executive Officer Albert Bourla on Friday urged US President Joe Biden to form a bipartisan coalition in Washington to address high drug costs.
There’s a great opportunity for Biden to take the initiative to “reduce significantly the cost of medicines for the patients, which is the thing that is now problematic,” Bourla said in an interview Friday with David Westin on Bloomberg Television’s “Balance of Power” show.
The out-of-pocket drug costs now paid by patients “is something that needs to be fixed, and it needs to be fixed urgently,” Bourla said. Pharmaceutical industry executives would be willing to help cover the cost of such reform, but they want to ensure their contributions would go directly toward lowering patient costs, he added.
“What we don’t want to do is to give money that will go to the black hole of the federal budget,” Bourla said. “We want everything that we contribute to go to lower the out-of-pocket costs of the patients.”
In the interview, Bourla didn’t discuss specifics on what reforms he might want to see from the government. In an earnings call in May, though, he said the three key areas the company would like to see from Congress and the Biden administration are rebate reform, capping beneficiary cost-sharing in Medicare Part D and incentivizing the uptake of biosimilars.
Pfizer and its partner BioNTech SE are the developers of a messenger RNA vaccine that, along with shots by Moderna Inc. and Johnson & Johnson, has helped stem the Covid-19 pandemic.
Bourla was asked if he was worried the goodwill developed by Pfizer’s actions in developing and producing the vaccine could turn over the industry’s overall actions on pricing. “I know that reputation is earned in drops,” he said. “But you can lose it in buckets.”
