Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., says he's working with Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., on lowering drug prices.
"I think certainly Bernie respects me and I respect him. He wants to drive down the cost of drugs by the government by saying here are the prices. I want to drive it down by increasing competition," Marshall said Friday during an appearance on Newsmax's "Chris Salcedo Show" during an interview on a wide range of topics.
"I want to make it easier for generics and biosimilars to get to market. But you know who's doing a great job in this area is ... Mark Cuban. So I want to sit down with Mark this afternoon and his team and say, 'What does your solution look like?' Look, last year alone these pharmacy benefit managers made some $11 billion on Medicare prescription drugs," he added.
People need to "dive in" to understand why prices are higher in the U.S.
"So let's say we're selling this particular drug in India. What India says is, 'If you don't give us a reduced amount on this, we're just going to cheat; we're going to copy your intellectual property and do this ourselves.' But also keep this in mind: Europe probably approves about 50% of the new drugs, these miracle drugs that we see. CAR [chimeric antigen receptor] T cell therapy is one of the great new drugs for lymphoma that we approved in the past two years, but they'll keep a lot of like those drugs off the market. So they don't have access to everything that we have. Certainly we want a level playing field, but it's the intellectual property that's important. And we've got to make sure these countries quit stealing our intellectual property," Marshall said.
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