Chairman Cassidy Delivers Remarks During Hearing on Making Prescription Drugs More Affordable for Families, Using Free Market Approach

WASHINGTON - U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy, M.D. (R-LA), Chairman of the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, delivered remarks during today's hearing on how Congress can lower the cost of prescription drugs for American families by increasing competition among generic and biosimilar manufacturers. U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy is spearheading President Trump's mission to make health care affordable, releasing his Money and Value for Patients (MVP) agenda yesterday.

Click here to watch the full hearing.

Cassidy's opening remarks as prepared for delivery can be found below:

The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions will please come to order.

Life is too expensive right now. Families are struggling to keep up, and much of that is driven by health care costs.

Treating patients in a hospital for the uninsured, I saw families struggle to afford their health care.

I announced a health care affordability plan earlier this week focused on making care less expensive. It's the number one issue in my state and across the country. There is a real urgency-Americans are hurting. They're frustrated. I am too!

The focus of this hearing is how do we make prescription drugs affordable for the American family. Let's start with what we know works; generics.

Approximately 90 percent of all drugs dispensed in the U.S. are generics. And they are affordable! In 2024, generics generated roughly $450 billion dollars in savings.

No other country has a generics system that works as well as the U.S. No other system develops as many new cures as the U.S. But those cures can be expensive and stretch the budgets of many families. Our goal should be to get more of those new cures to have generic competitors faster in a way that doesn't disincentivize the next cure from being developed.

Many of today's most innovative cures are biologics, rather than traditional drugs. They have their own generic equivalent called biosimilars. They're more complex and much more expensive. They are not as simple as your blood pressure pill. They're life-changing drugs that are complicated to make. While biologics only account for about 5 percent of all prescription drugs in the U.S., they make up nearly half of all prescription drug spending. They are driving costs.

We need to find a way that supports innovation and protects patients from unreasonably high prices. Both are possible.

My goal is to take the lessons learned from generics and apply them to the biosimilars market to bring down prices for Americans.

We created the regulatory framework for biosimilars before we even had one on the market: the first biosimilar was approved in the U.S. in 2015, five years after the law passed. It's time for an update.

It's a complicated market with many competing factors, but my priority is to get patients what they need at the lowest possible cost.

This committee has taken steps to make both generics and biosimilars less expensive: the Ensuring Timely Access to Generics Act and the Biosimilar Red Tape Elimination Act are great bills I am working to make into law.

We need a free market approach. Ranking Member Sanders suggests undermining the free market by eliminating patent protections. Patent protections incentivize ingenuity and drive the work needed to find treatments and cures. It's the kind of government overreach that only harms Americans in the long run.

Ranking Member Sanders and liberal organizations suggest the government should violate the patents of specific drugs that were derived from NIH-funded research as a way to address drug pricing. This is an extreme oversimplification.

Now, Ranking Member Sanders is right that a lot of the research on prescription drugs are done by the NIH. But in most cases this is BASIC research; the pharmaceutical companies are the ones identifying practical applications for the research and doing the clinical trials. Crediting the NIH with developing prescription drugs is like saying the Defense Department supported the creation of the internet, therefore they created Amazon. No, Jeff Bezos-an innovator-created Amazon.

Republicans oppose eliminating patents. Intellectual property protection is key to incentivizing innovation and therefore creating access to life-changing treatments. I am all about making these drugs available and affordable. The FDA has taken recent steps to streamline regulatory requirements and incentivize biosimilar drug development. Their changes to guidelines are estimated to reduce the costs of certain studies by up to 50 percent. Decreasing the cost for developer, decreases the cost for patients.

I'll note, this isn't the only way Republicans and President Trump are working to lower costs. Earlier this year, President Trump signed my PBM reform act into law to increase transparency into prescription drug transactions and crack down on middlemen, so you know what you're paying for, and to stop middlemen from profiting off American families.

We're taking the right steps. The Trump administration is doing their job; Congress needs to keep doing ours.

I thank the witnesses for being here and look forward to talking with you all about how we can support the Administration's efforts to lower drug prices and make health care more affordable for American families.

With that, I recognize Senator Sanders.

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