For decades, pharmaceutical companies have gamed the U.S. patent system and engaged in anticompetitive behaviors to drive up prices, making it increasingly harder for American families to afford life-saving drugs, a Congressional investigation has found.
Those findings, released Friday, were the culmination of three years of Congressional investigation into pharma’s price gouging and anticompetitive business practices.
The House Oversight Committee investigation, led by Democrats, relied upon hundreds of pages of internal documents and dozens of hours of Congressional testimony. The investigation found that pharma deploys an intentional strategy to extract profits off the backs of American patients, employers, and taxpayers — raising prices to meet revenue targets, incentivizing executives to hike prices, targeting the U.S. for higher prices while discounting the same exact drugs elsewhere, abusing the patent system to suppress competition and maintain monopoly pricing, and so on.
