A year after the pharmaceutical industry’s top lobbying group delivered a secret multimillion-dollar donation to congressional Republicans, GOP lawmakers quietly defanged rules lowering the price of life-saving medicines.
Weakening these rules helped turn the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America’s (PhRMA) $4 million dark-money contribution into an $8 billion windfall for drugmakers, according to a Congressional Budget Office estimate.
Records obtained by political watchdog group Issue One show that PhRMA last year gave millions to a Republican-aligned dark money group boosting Republican candidates’ campaigns across the country.
PhRMA — which represents companies like Pfizer, Eli Lilly, and Bayer, among others — shelled out more than $5.6 million in political donations last year, including a $4 million donation to the American Action Network, a dark-money group aligned with House Republican leadership. Between 2020 and 2023, PhRMA funneled $17.5 million to the dark-money group.
The American Action Network has spent millions boosting House Republican candidates. That includes more than $55 million in 2024 supporting GOP candidates in battleground districts. The dark-money group’s sister organization, the American Action Forum, lobbies for pharmaceutical interests under the guise of patient advocacy.
This year, Republican congressional majorities handed the pharmaceutical industry a series of victories, including rolling back many Biden-era rules on the Medicare Drug Price Negotiation program, which attempted to lower drug prices for Americans, who already spend more on their medications than any other country.
Among those concessions was an ongoing effort to repeal the “pill penalty,” a Biden-era Medicare pricing rule that would have allowed the government to speed up its efforts to lower the prices of drugs delivered in pill form. After the rule was challenged by PhRMA, the Trump administration directed the Department…
Auteur: Lucy Dean Stockton
