Health Care Reform Backgrounder
How the Health Care Reform Law Impacts Patient Care and Innovation
America's biopharmaceutical research companies support the new health care reform law because it can help improve patient care, make treatments more readily available to patients and help millions of uninsured Americans access health care coverage and services. It also provides some important incentives for future medical innovation.
For more than a year, Congress and the White House worked on a health care reform bill that, in one way or another, will impact every single person living in America. With health care costs rising significantly over the years - attributed in many ways to chronic disease and expensive emergency care services - and millions of patients unable to afford insurance or denied the ability to purchase it because of illness, reform was sorely needed.
We should all be proud to be working for biopharmaceutical research companies that stepped up to make a significant contribution to help pay for reform. Our contribution will help expand Medicaid benefits for low-income families and provide eligible seniors in the Medicare prescription drug program - who hit the coverage gap - with a 50 percent discount off their brand-name medicines.
We view this as a positive step forward for the millions of Americans - many of them seniors - who often had to forgo taking their prescribed medicines because they lacked coverage. Our support of health reform continues the tradition we started in helping millions of uninsured and financially-struggling Americans through the Partnership for Prescription Assistance (PPA) program.
The law also takes important steps to put a new emphasis on the need for prevention and it reduces patients' out-of-pocket costs for preventive care.
Today, millions of Americans suffer from largely preventable chronic disease - such as cancer, diabetes and heart disease. Three out of every four dollars spent on health care in the U.S. go to treat patients with chronic disease. In fact, the Milken Institute has estimated that lost workdays and lower employee productivity due to chronic disease resulted in an economic loss in the U.S. of more than $1 trillion in 2003. So by helping to prevent and better treat chronic disease, this law will not only make Americans healthier, it will help reduce costs.
Fortunately, we've made significant strides in the medical field. Medical advancements over the past several decades have revolutionized how we battle disease. Thanks in part to new medicines, death rates for cancer, heart disease and HIV/AIDS have been sharply reduced in the U.S.
This progress is real. For the first time, diseases once considered fatal can be managed as chronic illnesses. And new treatments have improved and extended the lives of millions of American patients, including some with previously untreatable rare diseases.
We believe that health care reform can help leverage and extend this progress in several ways. Expanding health insurance coverage to all Americans will mean that as we discover new medicines, patients will have access to the prescription drugs they need. Patients will no longer be denied insurance coverage because they have pre-existing conditions, and better insurance coverage will help promote better health.
The health care reform law also clears the way for regulatory approval of a new type of biologic medicines called biosimilars, which are similar versions of brand-name biologics (though not exact copies). This is expected to further increase patients' access to needed treatments, while preserving incentives for future investment in medical research through fair patent and data protection.
The biopharmaceutical industry is the most R&D-intensive sector in the country. In the last five years, our companies have invested nearly $284 billion on research and development of new medicines, including biologics. And, America's biotechnology firms account for 80 percent of global biotech R&D. The new law will encourage continued R&D investment needed to develop tomorrow's new treatment and cures.
This sustained investment comes at a time when the drug development process is increasingly expensive, time-consuming and risky. It currently takes an average of 10 to 15 years and more than $1 billion to develop just one new medicine.
Finally, workers employed at America's biopharmaceutical research companies should be assured that reform can have a lasting and positive impact for future generations to come. When biopharmaceutical companies came forward to support reform, they did so with the common belief that nobody should be denied care if they are sick and medicines that help save lives should be available to everyone. This was ultimately addressed in the new health care reform law and we should all be proud of this tremendous accomplishment.