August 24, 2004

State’s prescription affordability plan may be going awry

Don Perdue - Delegate

"The best laid plans of Mice and Men aft gang awry."

-- Robert Burns

On the day our West Virginia Legislature passed the Prescription Drug Availability and Affordability Act (House Bill 4084), I suggested -- stealing another famous author’s words that a mouse had "roared."

I still believe that emphatically. It’s the "gang awry" part that worries me now.

Over the past six months, the West Virginia Pharmaceutical Cost Management Council (formed as a result of HB 4084) has vigorously pursued its directive to arrive at a reference pricing schedule that "will maximize savings to the broadest percentage of the population of this state."

The council members have worked very hard to cut through a virtual forest of information (at times, it seems, provided only for pulp), and I heartily applaud their efforts.

However, recent discussions have indicated a cooling may have occurred toward implementing the pricing schedule during a special session to be called by Gov. Bob Wise.

I sincerely hope this is not true.

The heart of this bill, the place where, as one reporter has suggested, the "kryptonite for the Drug Industry" lies, is the recommendation of a reference pricing schedule and the promise it contains to measurably reduce prescription drug costs for virtually all West Virginians.

Not the "bait and switch" discounts we have heard so much about. Not a 10 percent reduction coupled with a 15 percent price increase (or a 500 percent increase, as in the case of the drug Norvir). Not even the myopic Medicare drug plan -- but real, substantial and sustainable savings.

Even more than these, the very fact that the ownership of such a landmark initiative lies with us, with West Virginia, makes every argument for delay (and the death it implies for this legislation) seem little more than a cry for us to, once again, move to the back of the bus.

Is it too much to ask that we might, just once, turn on the headlamps and drive?

A brown paper bag state, with brown paper bag prospects, we nonetheless had enough "sand" to build a luminary. The candle represented by this act could light the feet of an entire nation stumbling in twilight. Or it could simply be snuffed out.

Whether cool breeze or smothering hand, the light would suffer. So will the Mice. And so will the Men.

Delegate Don Perdue, a Democrat and a registered pharmacist, represents the 17th District (Wayne County) in the West Virginia House of Delegates.