Originally written by Leah Schwarting, Villages Daily Sun
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is no stranger to bold legislation, and he promised on Thursday that more is on the way.
In the past year alone, he’s signed laws to protect parental rights in education, mend the struggling property insurance market and provide record funding to preserve the state’s water resources.
His next target: the most comprehensive prescription drug legislation in Florida history.
Calling for “long overdue reforms” from Eisenhower Recreation, DeSantis outlined his plan to slap pharmacy benefit managers — often described as “middlemen” between your insurance company and your pharmacy — with regulations to lower drug costs.
The move would give more flexibility to consumers and more information about what their drugs cost.
“And I think you’ve seen over the last four years, when we say we’re going to do something, we usually do get it done,” he said.
The cost of 1,216 drugs rose an average of 31.6% between July 2021 and July 2022, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.
“So the inflation is bad enough as it is, and that’s over and above even the general inflation rate,” DeSantis said. “That has a huge impact on a lot of folks, particularly senior citizens.”
DeSantis has become one of the most popular governors in America, with approval ratings that hover near 65%, in large part because of his push to put seniors first when it comes to health care initiatives.
At the early onset of coronavirus pandemic, he helped usher in a large-scale testing site at The Villages Polo Club for seniors and made sure senior communities like The Villages got the first batch of 400,000 rapid antigen tests. When vaccines became available, he initiated a “Seniors First” strategy so Florida’s most vulnerable population could get vaccinated first.
That action prevented about 6,700 hospitalizations and 2,400 deaths in the first five months of 2021, the Department of Health and Human Services found.
On another front, his 2019 plan to import more drugs from Canada is still awaiting federal approval.
“This was all happening over 2020 mostly, then the new administration comes in, and (President Joe) Biden himself claimed this is something he wants,” DeSantis said. “Yet, the FDA has stonewalled us for two years on this issue.”
That’s not good enough for Florida, he said.
DeSantis last year sued the FDA over the delay while greenlighting $4 million in the state budget for more price transparency.
Seven out of 10 adults age 40 and older use at least one prescription medication, and one in five need five or more, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
DeSantis vowed he will make the issue a priority during the 2023 legislative session, which starts in March.
“What we’re going to be doing is we’re going to protect consumers and increase accountability,” he said. “There’s going to be three main things: prohibiting spread pricing, prohibiting reimbursement clawbacks, and then tackling issues with-so-called steering.”
One way steering occurs is when PBMs force consumers to use their mail-order pharmacy to fill prescriptions.
“They don’t give you the option to shop around the for the best deal,” DeSantis said. “What we’re going to say is, you’re free to use the mail-in pharmacy that they’re telling you to use, but you do not have to.”
Steve Waterhouse, of the Village of Pine Ridge, who chairs the Alzheimer’s Association of Central and North Florida, applauded the governor’s stance.
Waterhouse’s wife, Gina, suffers from Alzheimer’s and enrolled in a trial for the drug aducanumab in 2016.
It helped improve her condition, he told those at Eisenhower — but it cost more than $50,000 a year when it hit the market.
“Now, if I had to pay that for five years to save my wife, $250,000, I’d sell anything I had to come up with that money,” Waterhouse said. “But what about people who can’t do that?”
Your health shouldn’t be tied to your wealth, he told the Daily Sun.
“If you chose a career path that makes you a millionaire, a multi-millionaire, you know you’re going to get the drugs you need,” he said. “But if you took a career path that — you were a teacher for instance — didn’t lead you to that and your health care insurance doesn’t happen to pay for it, like Medicare does not, then you’re out of the picture. That shouldn’t be the case in America.”
DeSantis was joined in The Villages by Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo who blasted pharmaceutical companies for “charging you 10 times as much as they’re charging someone in Peru or Belgium or wherever because they need the money. It’s a total lie. The research is mostly NIH funded, and we paid for that.”
According to AARP, most Americans spend about $1,300 a year on prescription medicines.
“This package of reforms is a great step in the right direction,” DeSantis said.
