PHRMA

Excerpted Remarks of

Billy Tauzin
President and Chief Executive Officer
Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America

PhRMA 2007 Annual Meeting
Washington, DC
March 16, 2007

PhRMA’s central mission is to serve the patients of America and to always remain true to that mission.

When we declared that we want and expect our medicines to be available to the patients who need them – even when they cannot afford them – we delivered on that promise. Along with hundreds of partners, we successfully launched our national Partnership for Prescription Assistance initiative (PPA).

When we declared that seniors should not have to choose between buying food or needed medicines – or take dangerous chances buying their medicines on the internet – we again joined with our health care partners in a huge national effort to help seniors enroll in the new Medicare Part D prescription drug benefit. Seniors responded and they enrolled in numbers – 39 million seniors – that far exceeded all expectations. Now over 90 percent of seniors and disabled Americans enjoy comprehensive prescription drug coverage, in the plan they choose and which best meets their individual needs.

When we all witnessed the improved compliance rates of seniors enrolled in Medicare Part D, we were reminded once again of the importance of insurance coverage for health care. We are committed to working with our partners across America to solve the under and uninsured issues facing our health care system.

In state after state we are working to ensure that prescription drugs are included in new state comprehensive coverage plans.

At the Federal level, we are supporting the reauthorization of SCHIP and partnering with the YMCA and Easter Seals to enroll more of the five million covered children who have not yet enrolled.

We’re trying to fix, limit or reverse the damage already being done by the five top chronic diseases. Chronic disease is responsible for 75 percent of our health care spending.

For example, one of every three children born in 2000 will likely be diabetic in his or her lifetime. Ten percent of school children today suffer with asthma.

A recent study demonstrated that we could reduce emergency visits by 91 percent and outpatient visits by 56 percent for children with asthma who learned to manage their disease with prescription medicines currently available.

When – along with so many of our health care partners – we recognized the need to focus more of our efforts on disease awareness, early screening, health care maintenance, healthy living, and, most importantly, prevention, we realized the need to redefine our role in the broader health care reform equation.

The success of the GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) Asheville employer-based diabetic project led us to launch our own Healthy Town pilots in Fresno, California, and Jackson, Mississippi.

We have launched our Diversity Project to aggressively address the health disparity issues that confront minority communities across America and to involve more minority members of congress and the state legislatures in our efforts.

Additionally, we know that for every dollar well spent on needed medications we can save over four dollars of health care costs, and vastly improve health care outcomes.

If chronic diseases eat up 75 percent of our health care dollar, and if more and more of us will face not one but several of these diseases simultaneously, we need to focus not just on prevention, but on managing the various combinations of these diseases. Money spent on disease management strategies would be vastly eclipsed by all the pain and suffering avoided and the damage prevented, not to mention all the productivity gained and lives saved.

When we witnessed the alarming, rising trend in the misuse of medicines in our country, we partnered with DARE and the Partnership for a Drug Free America to bring the messages of appropriate medicine use to the school children of our country.

Today, in America, our patients do not have has to ask his or her doctors, nurses, hospitals or pharmacies where their medicines come from, or whether they are even real or not. Counterfeit medicines in America are still a 1 percent problem, at worst.

But all that is about to change.

Congress is considering a bill that would abandon the FDA closed regulatory system. They could allow medicines to flow into this country from all parts of the world, outside the custody and control of our companies. Not only would this “importation” legislation fail to even require the registration of a shipper to a U.S. wholesaler or pharmacy, this bill would open the closed regulatory system that today protects America patients from the epidemic of fake, counterfeit and killing drugs coming from increasingly skillful and unscrupulous criminals.

Finally, patients need and deserve better than a drug discovery and clinical trial testing model that costs nearly $1 billion to develop a new medicine and that reduces an innovative medicine’s time on the market under patent protection to 11 to 12 years on average.

First, this time-consuming and costly process simply costs too much and takes too long for the patients who desperately wait for a remedy or cure.

Second, this costly and time-consuming process doesn’t even begin to make enough room for the research and discovery of drugs and treatments for the 6,000 rare diseases which affect over 25 million Americans.

Third, science is advancing fast. We must begin to think about – and help the FDA to plan for – new research and testing models that take full advantage of scientific breakthroughs.

Fourth, [We] and the FDA need room for a research and testing model that is both more efficient and more accurate in its determination of benefit and risk.

We need to focus with laser-like accuracy on our mission to save lives and improve the human condition.

The trust we earn will be all the more precious for the effort we expend to earn it.