Hi everybody, Cheryl Ackison here.

Welcome to another edition of Full Measure After Hours.

Today, how much did Big Pharma spend to try to stop new drug price control initiatives?

A shake-up is in the works with the Trump administration promising to upend our medical health

establishment. That stands to hit hard with America's pharmaceutical industry, which has spent

hundreds of millions of dollars to try to influence politicians to get favorable laws and policies

in recent years. Some hugely profitable drugs are already being targeted

under price controls that were passed in 2022 as part of the Inflation Reduction Act. The Watchdog Group

Public Citizen looked into how much some of the big-name drug companies have spent trying to fight the new

price control initiative. They put out a report that I saw, so I contacted Public Citizen to talk

to them about it, and you'll hear from Lisa Gilbert today in this podcast with Public Citizen.

Yeah, well, so we were looking in advance of an important hearing that Bernie Sanders held in the HELP Committee.

He brought in three CEOs from Bristol-Myers Squibb, Johnson & Johnson, and Merck, to talk about

price gouging and talk about how they had been

attempting to influence the Inflation Reduction Act. So this piece looked right at those three

companies, checking in on their lobbying and who they've been hiring, how many people they've

been hiring to try to make that influence happen. What were these companies trying to do?

What influence did they try to have on the Inflation Reduction Act?

Well, they did not like it. And that is because it's the first time ever we've been able to negotiate drug prices.

As I'm sure you and everyone out there in America knows, drug prices are way too high. And one of the things that pharmaceutical companies do not want

is to be able to have those prices negotiated by the government, by Medicare, so that they become

lower and regular Americans can have fair pricing. I think maybe what I had to learn to understand

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