For more than four years, a bill to establish a Prescription Drug Affordability Board has floated through the halls of Illinois’s Statehouse to no avail.
Now, a bipartisan group of lawmakers is taking another shot with the bill’s fifth incarnation.
Prescription drugs are one of the largest healthcare related costs in the country, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. That department reported Americans spent $406 billion out of pocket on retail prescription drugs in 2022. But some Illinois lawmakers believe state affordability boards are the first step toward lowering drug costs.
“If we have the ability to review some of these drugs that pose the biggest affordability challenge, then we will hopefully see all health insurance premiums decrease across the board,” state Rep. Nabeela Syed, D-Palatine, told the Sun-Times Wednesday.
Syed and state Sen. Robert Peters, D-Chicago, filed the bill in each of their chambers of the General Assembly. Their biggest challenge could be just getting the bill to the floor.
Springfield, like baseball, has a host of unwritten rules. Chief among them is House Speaker Chris Welch’s Rule of 60, requiring 60 Democrats to approve a bill before it goes up for a vote.
In sessions past, the bill failed to reach that threshold. This year’s version is the same as past years, but while its substance hasn’t changed, Syed says legislators’ opinions have.
“I believe, especially now more than ever, we have the ability to get more than enough members on board to get legislation like this across… coming off of election season, many of my colleagues have heard at the doors that people can’t afford groceries, they can’t afford to pay their mortgage and they can’t afford their prescription drugs,” she said.
Since Maryland became the first state to approve creating an affordability board in 2019, 10 other states have followed suit.
The version with the largest influence on Illinois’s current legislation was passed in Minnesota. Like the Illinois proposal, Minnesota’s law sets an upper payment limit at Medicare-negotiated levels, said Anusha Thotakura, executive director of Citizen Action Illinois a Chicago-based advocacy group.
Minnesota implemented its board in 2020 to mixed results. According to the Minnesota Department of Health, prescription drug prices continued to rise above inflationary rates, but results were preliminary.
Dr. Anthony Douglas, a general surgery resident at University of Chicago Medicine, joined Syed and Peters at a Springfield news conference touting their latest attempt to get the bill passed.
Douglas said many Illinois residents are forced to choose between paying for prescriptions or paying for housing, food or child care. So they choose to ration their prescription medications, skipping doses to avoid paying for refills as often..
“A woman with Type 1 diabetes came to our emergency department with appendicitis because she was not taking the insulin she was prescribed,” Douglas said. “Her surgery was delayed, her blood sugars were too high. When I asked her why she wasn’t taking her medications, her answer was quite simple: ‘I cannot afford it.’”