The drug access crisis in the U.S. is nothing new. For years now, the U.S. government has been aware of severely skyrocketing prices and shortages of drugs. According to a Gallup poll, nearly 18 million Americans are unable to pay for prescribed medications and one in 10 Americans is forced to skip dosages to conserve their pills to save more money. The COVID-19 pandemic has only exacerbated this drug access crisis. 

Luckily, the pandemic was a wake-up call, which encouraged the health industry to begin reforms and enact change to counter these systemic problems by streamlining the approval process of drugs to provide vaccines to the general public faster, allowing medical products like hand sanitizers to be produced in factories not traditionally meant for those items, and shifting towards a continuous pharmaceutical manufacturing procedure. However, while we have begun to implement reform in this area, little has actually been done to solve the exploitative habits of big pharmaceutical companies’ price-gouging. 

Medications intended for a variety of treatments have been subjected to price increases. The patent for the generic version of Daraprim, which is used to treat malaria and other kinds of infections, was acquired by Vyera Pharmaceuticals in 2015. Vyera then proceeded to increase the price from $13.50 to $750. Despite this outrageous–and unjustified–price increase, the owner of Vyera, Martin Shkreli, was only punished in January of 2022, when a U.S. judge banned him from the pharmaceutical industry and levied a $65 million fine. The trend of rapidly increasing prices doesn’t stop with Daraprim, but rather extends to many other lifesaving drugs. The costs of EpiPens and some of the most prescribed medications have also seen drastic price increases despite no real improvement in quality or effectiveness. The cost of medication has also increased in cases where the original creators of drugs didn’t want that outcome. For instance, the creators of insulin sold the original patent for one dollar because they wanted to make the medication as easily accessible as they could. However, over the past decade, the cost of insulin has increased to the point where a single vial costs around $300. With Type 1 diabetics needing 2-3 vials a month and Type 2 diabetics needing upwards of six vials a month on average, it can cost $7,200-21,600 just for someone with diabetes to get the insulin they need. 

This is a major problem because more than 66 percent of all adults in the United States (over 131 million people) use prescription drugs. While Americans do not consume more drugs than their non-U.S. counterparts, they can spend 80-150% more on medications. These outrageous prices can mean that Americans skip out on medications they desperately need or try to ration the medications they have, which can result in severe illness, and in some cases, death.

So if this issue impacts so many people, why hasn’t it been addressed by the government? The thing is, the government has tried to address these problems. President Biden said in December that the U.S. had to do something about “outrageously expensive” prescription drugs. Biden even released a plan, which included expansions on existing efforts to reform that could be used to lower the cost of prescription drugs. California even passed a bill last year that would allow the state to start producing its own brand of generic medications in an effort to reduce the cost of drugs. 

Legislation to reduce the cost of drugs like the Elijah E. Cummings Lower Drug Costs Now Act, which would give the federal government the power to negotiate prescription drug prices and cap out-of-pocket expenditures for consumers, has repeatedly been proposed only toeventually die in Congress. Despite all these efforts, the federal government has never been able to come to an agreement on the solution to the insanely high prices of medications. Honestly, it’s disappointing to think that in a mock congress exercise, my high school AP Government class was able to more quickly and effectively come to an agreement on the drug-price crisis than the actual government. If a group of high school students can get around to passing a bill dealing with reducing drug prices, then the officials that we elected into office should be able to do so as well. 

In the end, despite the many years of the government being aware of the problem, it feels like the only real resolution was brought on by Mark Cuban. Cuban, an American billionaire entrepreneur and one of the judges on Shark Tank, decided to create the Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drugs Company (MCCPDC) to sell and distribute generic drugs. Cuban’s company plans to charge consumers 15% above the manufacturing cost for the generic medications, plus a $3 fee for pharmacists and $5 for shipping. Individuals will still require a prescription from their doctor to get the medications and will need to pay out of pocket for the medications. Still, just a quick look at the MCCPDC website shows that consumers will likely experience significant decreases in the amount of money they have to pay for the medications they need. For instance, Abacavir, a drug used to treat HIV, retails for $1,096.20 but with MCCPDC it only costs $57.60. Imatinib, used for leukemia and other cancers, is sold for $17.10 at MCCPDC but it usually retails at $2,502.60 at other pharmacies.

Now, Cuban is only able to lower his prices and follow this business model as he has cut out the middlemen of the pharmaceutical industry like pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), which are paid by health insurers to negotiate rebates with drug manufacturers and pay pharmacies to sell certain medications. With this being essentially the one “difference” the MCCPD has between itself and other traditional pharmaceutical suppliers, it is clear that there is more the government could have done. The U.S. government could have chosen to regulate PBMs, require companies to justify their prices, institute more policies to increase competition within the pharmaceutical industry. But they didn’t. If the government weren’t afraid of the threats that regulations would hinder innovation or too busy being paid off by the pharmaceutical industry, the government could have implemented the same strategy that Cuban did and actually introduced more competition in the pharmaceutical industry years ago. If they had simply come to an agreement on an issue that is universally regarded as a serious and concerning one, we wouldn’t have to resort to finding a solution in a billionaire who otherwise has no ties to the pharmaceutical industry. 

So yes, it’s wonderful that millions of Americans will be able to afford the medications they need through MCCPD. It is great that Cuban is challenging the pharmaceutical industry. If everything works out as planned, Americans will have better access to life-saving drugs and pharmaceutical companies will be forced to adapt and lower their prices to stay competitive. But, the U.S. government should have been the one to force this to happen, not Cuban.

While it may be the result of a free market that billionaires can make such impactful waves in the pharmaceutical industry by introducing more competition, the fact that the drug cost crisis got as bad as it was should be reason enough to increase regulations and enact legislation that lowers the cost of pharmaceuticals. An issue as serious as the health of the country and the access to life-saving drugs should not be left at the hands of the world’s wealthiest—it should be dealt with by our elected officials and the government.