What to watch at today’s drug pricing hearings

Two of the most powerful congressional committees are holding hearings on drug pricing later today: the House Oversight Committee and the Senate Finance Committee. Both hearings are meant to give lawmakers unbiased information on why drug prices keep rising, but lobbyists tell me they’ll be paying more attention to the members of Congress themselves than the experts flown in from Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and Memorial Sloan Kettering, most of whom are well-known in pharma policy circles.

For many lawmakers, today’s opening statements and questions will be their first opportunity this term to wade into the national conversation around drug pricing. And for K Street, that means it’s an opportunity to size up who is a potential friend and who is a foe.

Washington will, for sure, be paying close attention to remarks from Democratic upstarts like Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, and Ro Khanna of California, all of whom recently earned spots on the oversight panel. But lobbyists told me they’re just as eager, if not more so, to hear from Republicans.
 
Here’s a few things they tell me they’ll be looking for:

• Whether Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee align with Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, the Republican who chairs the committee and who has been more antagonistic toward drug makers than many of his GOP colleagues.
• How members of the ultra-conservative House Freedom Caucus will approach drug pricing. The caucus’ co-founder, Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, is the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee and four additional Freedom Caucus members were recently added to the panel, too.
• Where members of Congress stand on some of the sweeping drug pricing ideas proposed by the Trump administration, like his plan to tie what Medicare pays for drugs to what other countries pay.