A handful of newly elected Democrats, including Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Katie Porter of California put drug industry CEOs on the defensive Wednesday like they’ve never been before.
The trio of freshman lawmakers used an Oversight Committee hearing to press the CEOs of Teva, Celgene and Bristol-Myers Squibb — painfully and directly — on the results of an 18-month investigation into the pricing of two drugs: Teva’s Multiple Sclerosis drug copaxone and Bristol-Myers Squibb’s multiple myeloma drug revlimid.
Porter, a former consumer protection attorney who has made a name for herself by embarrassing CEOs with prosecutorial questions and a white board, lived up to her reputation. She used that white board to display Celgene’s repeated price hikes for revlimid, which now costs $763 per dose, up from $215 in 2005, and demanded that Mark Alles, who served as Celgene’s CEO until Bristol Myers Squibb acquired the company in 2019, on explain whether the drug had improved over the same time period.TODAY >> I asked a Big Pharma CEO to justify why his company raised the price of a lifesaving cancer drug by over $500 *per pill* since it first hit the market. He couldn’t answer.
— Rep. Katie Porter (@RepKatiePorter) September 30, 2020
This same CEO made $13 MILLION in 2017— including a $500,000 bonus for this price hike. https://t.co/3KWm6tcXC0
Wednesday, September 30, 2020
A Hearing
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