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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) slammed the GOP for blocking potentially lifesaving reforms to the pharmaceutical industry in a powerful speech on Wednesday, highlighting the vast power that unelected and increasingly unpopular billionaire Elon Musk has over the party.
In a hearing in the House Committee on Energy and Commerce advocating for reforms on pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), Ocasio-Cortez pointed out that such proposals could have already been signed into law if Republicans hadn’t capitulated to Musk’s intervention online last year.
“Republicans are in support, Democrats are in support — so what happened? Well, on December 15th, at 4:15 in the morning, Elon Musk began firing off a barrage of social media posts opposing pharmacy benefit manager reform,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
“All of a sudden, this bill that had almost unanimous support fell apart in a matter of hours,” she went on. “We had nearly 435 members on board with it — he sends one tweet, and all of a sudden, everyone backs off. And it kills drug pricing reform that would save people money on their insulin, on their asthma inhalers — everything that they need.”
Patient advocates have long called for PBMs to be reined in over opaque practices that create yet more roadblocks for patients within the already complex and corporate health care system. Reforms proposed in Congress last year, a result of years of negotiations, would have limited the power of PBMs, widely regarded as middlemen in the pharmaceutical industry who have been scrutinized by federal regulators for their role in artificially inflating the costs of drug prices for patients and helping to kill small pharmacies across the country.
Indeed, language to reform PBMs was originally included in Congress’s budget bill in December. But GOP leadership dropped the proposal from the legislation after Musk complained about the resolution being too long, with too much “pork” — a move critics said was a capitulation to the pharmaceutical industry.
Worse, after the language was dropped, Musk said he didn’t even know what a PBM is, Ocasio-Cortez pointed out.
“And then, to kick it off, five days after he kills pharmacy benefit manager reform, we get this tweet from Elon Musk: ‘What is a “pharmacy benefit manager?”’” said the lawmaker.
“The problem here isn’t a substance issue, it’s not a process issue — it’s an oligarchy issue,” Ocasio-Cortez went on. “Whether you’re a Democrat or you’re a Republican, everyone here was elected to be accountable to the people of the United States — not to be governed by tweet, but to be governed by their duly elected representation.”
The lawmaker said that Republicans should reject Musk’s influence to pass these reforms.
“So I would love a commitment from our Republican counterparts, who we agree with on this issue, to just put it on the floor. And let us vote for it,” she said. “And we can actually get a result for the American people by booting this guy out from political influence.”
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