Big Pharma Front Groups Muddle Debate Over Drug Prices, Patient Advocates Say

The brief videos posted by a group called Seniors 4 Better Care to YouTube look just like the political ads that take over the airwaves during campaign season. The voiceover in one breezy video claims without context that former President Joe Biden “broke” Medicare, the popular government insurance program for seniors, and that only President Donald Trump can “fix it.”

Another video suggests policies left over from the Biden era are thwarting research into a cure for cancer, while Trump’s election will bring a “golden age” and the elusive cure for cancer by “promoting innovation.” The video fails to mention that the Trump administration’s massive cuts to federal health agencies are causing mass layoffs at the National Institutes of Health, the largest funder of cancer research in the world. Titled “The Cure,” the video has 1.3 million views on YouTube alone.

Seniors 4 Better Care, the group behind the video, sounds like an advocacy organization run for and by older patients. However, the group does not include any contact information or details about membership on its website. Seniors 4 Better Care is reportedly a “shell group” for the American Prosperity Alliance, a nonprofit that funnels millions of dollars from wealthy funders to Republican super-PACs. And, according to a new report from the patient advocacy group Patients For Affordable Drugs, Seniors 4 Better Care is an outspoken opponent of drug pricing reforms championed by Biden that allow Medicare to negotiate with drug companies.

Truthout reached out to Patients For Affordable Drugs – a patient advocacy group founded by a cancer survivor that mobilizes real patients and does not take funding from the industry (though the group does take some funding from philanthropist John Arnold) – to hear more about its research on Seniors 4 Better Care’s attempts to pass as a patient advocacy organization even as it acts in the interests of corporations. Merith Basey, the executive director of Patients For Affordable Drugs, said a closer look reveals that Seniors 4 Better Care parrots talking points from PhRMA, a trade association that runs public relations for the pharmaceutical industry. The American Prosperity Alliance (the “‘dark money conduit” behind Seniors 4 Better Care) did not respond to a request for comment.

Patients For Affordable Drug’s report, The Rampant Reach of Pharma’s Hidden Hand, details the links between Big Pharma, Seniors 4 Better Care and five more groups, including the Alliance for Aging Research, the Council for Affordable Health Coverage, and the American Action Forum.

“And when you look closer, you see their boards are full of people with ties to the pharmaceutical industry, and if you look even closer, you can see how much money they are spending on ads, primarily against Medicare negotiations,” Basey said in an interview with Truthout.

In 2022, Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, which reforms Medicare to leverage its massive rolls of medicine-consuming members and negotiate prices for up to 60 commonly used drugs directly with manufacturers, just as other wealthy governments do for all of their residents.

While new drugs are often developed in the United States and become available here first, price negotiations by other countries are one of several reasons why people in the U.S. pay three times as much for brand-name prescriptions on average. Surveys suggest that more than a third of U.S. patients with four or more prescriptions are struggling to afford medicines prescribed by doctors, and a majority blame drug companies for unaffordable prices. Last year, the Centers for Disease Control found that 9 million people were skipping doses of prescribed drugs due to cost, although surveys suggest that number is much higher.

The Biden-era reforms included in the Inflation Reduction Act capped out-of-pocket spending on prescription drugs for Medicare recipients at $2,000 annually. The law also caps copays for insulin, which diabetes patients need in order to live, at $35 for Medicare members. The Inflation Reduction Act’s price negotiation provisions are designed to pay for the savings. After years of skyrocketing insulin prices under an opaque system that links drug makers with insurance companies through controversial middlemen known as Pharmacy Benefit Managers, the price of insulin finally plummeted in 2024 after reforms and public outcry.

“Other policies in the IRA [Inflation Reduction Act] include free vaccines for people on Medicare, and there’s also a provision that looks at curbing drug company price gouging by penalizing drug companies for increasing prices faster than the rate of inflation,” Basey said.

PhRMA – the industry trade association for drug companies – spent $52 million on lobbying and funding for groups fighting against the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022 and other reforms, according to an analysis by Politico. As lawmakers and Trump’s new administrators mulled over implementation of the law’s Medicare provisions, PhRMA spent nearly $13 million on lobbying in the first three months of 2025 alone, more than the group has ever spent in a single quarter. Drug companies filed multiple lawsuits against Medicare negotiations over drug prices, but Basey said Trump’s Justice Department has defended the law so far.

Seniors 4 Better Care recently spent $100,000 on Facebook and YouTube pushing pharmaceutical industry narratives and videos attacking Biden and the IRA. The group received $5 million in funding for “issue support” from the American Prosperity Alliance, which has ties to Republican House leadership and receives large amounts of funding from drug makers, such as Eli Lilly and Johnson & Johnson, according to the report.

“We know ultimately that polling shows that Americans are very aware that pharmaceutical corporations are behind the high price of drugs, so [drug companies] have to find alternative ways to mislead the public,” Basey said. “When groups have innocuous sounding names like Seniors 4 Better Care, if you don’t do your homework, you might assume they are a group out to support seniors.”

The Council for Affordable Health Coverage (CAHC), another group documented as having links to Big Pharma in the report, has argued in the media that the Inflation Reduction Act’s Medicare reforms would raise insurance premiums for seniors — an industry talking point that fails to mention the savings in out-of-pocket costs for medicine secured by price negotiations and spending caps in the Inflation Reduction Act, according to Basey.

The Council for Affordable Health Coverage is operated by Horizon Government Affairs, a pharmaceutical lobbying firm that engages directly with Congress on behalf of PhRMA, according to the report. Multiple former or current lobbyists, PR officers and executives for drug companies sit on the group’s board. The Council for Affordable Health Coverage and Horizon Government Affairs even share the same office and much of the same staff. The Council for Affordable Health Coverage did not respond to a request for comment by the time this article was published.

One of the main talking points put forward by such groups is that research and development of new drugs will be slowed or even halted for cancer and rare diseases as drug companies are forced to divest because they have to sell drugs at lower prices. Seniors 4 Better Care calls this the “Biden pill penalty” in its viral videos.

However, research shows that the pharmaceutical industry is so profitable compared to other industries that it would remain so even with $1 trillion in fewer drug sales. The industry saw “remarkable” revenue growth in 2024, with top players Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk boasting 32 percent and 26 percent increases in sales respectively.

Now that Trump has issued an executive order aimed at “immediately” lowering prescription drug prices with threats and vague policies that have frustrated the industry despite being unlikely to work anytime soon, Bayes said front groups for Big Pharma are muddling the debate over how to actually bring prices down for good.

“When your board is stacked with industry insiders, your primary funding comes from [the industry], and your talking points mirror those of drug lobbyists, you’re not a patient advocacy organization — you’re a PR operation,” Basey said.