[Congressional Record Volume 166, Number 27 (Monday, February 10, 2020)]
[Senate]
[Pages S951-S952]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                       Senate Legislative Agenda

  Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, the impeachment process that has consumed 
our country over the last several months is finally at an end. Every 
Member of this Chamber has spent dozens of hours, if not more, studying 
the precedents, listening to the House managers and the President's 
legal team as they presented their arguments, including the testimony 
of 13 witnesses whose sworn testimony was presented during the Senate 
trial.
  In the end, the majority of the Senators agreed that President Trump 
should be acquitted of the charges brought by the House. No matter how 
each Senator voted or felt about the end result, I can hope that we 
would all agree on one thing, and that is, it is time to move forward.
  Impeachment has paralyzed the work of Congress for far too long, and 
we can't continue to allow the divisions and partisan games that are 
associated with it to prevent us from doing the jobs we were sent here 
to do. We are 9 months away from the next election. I think it is 
somewhere around 267 days, if I am not mistaken. That is when the 
American people will choose their next President and vote on the 
direction of the country. But until then, our constituents expect us to 
use the remainder of the time we have here to find consensus where and 
when we can and to make progress on issues that they care most about.
  For my constituents in Texas, the No. 1 item on their list is 
prescription drug pricing. I continue to hear from my constituents in 
Texas who feel burdened, confused, and down-right frustrated by rising 
costs at the pharmacy. One of the reasons why I think that is probably 
true is that under the Affordable Care Act deductibles have risen and 
copays have ballooned, such that consumers are now paying more out of 
pocket for their prescription drugs than ever before, because from all 
of the negotiated deals between the pharmaceutical manufacturers and 
the prescription pharmacy benefit managers, none of that savings 
directly goes into the pocket of the consumer. So with increased 
deductibles and with expanded copays, my constituents, and, I dare say, 
all of our constituents are feeling more of that coming out of their 
pocket.

  Medications that people have been taking for years just keep getting 
more and more expensive with no explanation behind the increase. To me, 
the No. 1 example of that is insulin. I support the role of our patent 
system to protect research and development of lifesaving and innovative 
drugs, that people get a period of exclusivity--the companies that 
bring them into the market--a period of exclusivity so they can recoup 
their sunk costs and perhaps even make a profit, but there is just 
simply no explanation for a drug like insulin, that has been on the 
market for so long, for people to see $1,200 and higher copays, as we 
heard in the Senate Finance Committee hearing.
  A mother talked about her young son who was leaving the nest, so to 
speak, but he was unable to meet the $1,200 copay. He was deferring 
decisions in his life like buying a house and perhaps even getting 
married because of the burden of that copay. We must do better, 
particularly on drugs that have been on the market for a long, long 
time, like insulin, that are so important for treating conditions like 
diabetes.
  But perhaps the single most--well, it is really the most common 
concern I hear about is a drug called HUMIRA, and that is perhaps 
because it is the most widely prescribed drug in the world. This drug 
is a miracle drug, to be sure. It treats arthritis and a number of 
other immunodeficiency conditions, and it has been available for 15 
years.
  Now, you typically think of an expensive drug as being one, as I 
said, freshly on the market, which has just completed costly research 
and development, but a drug that has been around 15 years, can it be 
still protected by those patents, even though it was supposed to expire 
years earlier? Well, apparently, it can.
  Smart lawyers with pharmaceutical manufacturers have figured a way to 
impose what is known as patent thickets. In other words, they can 
request and get issued so many different patents that they literally 
can prolong the period in which a drug manufacturer can claim exclusive 
right to the sales of that drug.
  AbbVie, the company that makes HUMIRA, has figured this out. They 
figured out how to game the patent system so that no competition ever 
comes to market, and they remain the sole provider of this widely used 
drug. Their playbook involves an intricate maze of overlapping patents, 
which make it nearly impossible for a competitor to come to market.
  Here is the best evidence of that. Today there are five companies 
that compete with HUMIRA in Europe, but all are blocked from their 
competing drugs being sold here in America until 2023. That is as a 
result of this patent thicketing gamesmanship. The smart lawyers at 
AbbVie have effectively found loopholes that allow them to create and 
maintain a monopoly.
  Unfortunately, this isn't the only example of anticompetitive 
behavior in the pharmaceutical industry. A number of my constituents 
have also told me about their experience with a drug called Namenda, 
which is used by patients with Alzheimer's, a devastating disease. Like 
other new drugs, it began with an exclusivity period, where they were 
the sole provider, but when that period was coming to a close, the 
drugmaker switched from a twice-daily to a once-daily dose. Believe it 
or not, that triggers a new patent application. That move itself 
prevented pharmacists from being able to switch patients to a lower 
cost generic, even though it is just as effective, so the company could 
continue to reap enormous profits basically by just changing from 
twice-a-day to once-a-day application.
  The enemy here is not our patent system. It is the abuse of the 
patent system by some pharmaceutical companies--again, not all 
pharmaceutical companies--but some in ways that directly harm the 
people we represent, the American people.
  Earlier this year, I introduced a bill with my friend, the Democratic 
Senator from Connecticut, Richard Blumenthal, to take aim at some of 
these corrupt practices. Our bill strikes the delicate balance between 
protecting innovation while increasing competition, and when it passes, 
it will be a win for every American who has felt the pain of sticker 
shock at the pharmacy.
  We know it takes a lot more than good policy to get a bill turned 
into law around here. It takes bipartisanship. It takes broad consensus 
support to get the green light from the appropriate committees and to 
pass them through both Houses of the Senate. Well, you would think a 
bill like this that is bipartisan, has broad support, passed 
unanimously out of the Judiciary Committee, and reduces Federal 
spending would be a piece of cake to

[[Page S952]]

pass, but they haven't been in the Senate during this period of our 
divisiveness.
  The senior Senator from New York, the Democratic leader, has refused 
to let this bill pass without a Broadway-scale production of other 
unrelated legislation. Back in November, I came to the floor to ask 
that this bill be passed by unanimous consent--again, since it had 
passed unanimously out of the Judiciary Committee, and we had hotlined 
the bill to see if there were any other objections in the Senate and 
found none.
  Well, in the month that followed, after the senior Senator from New 
York objected to passing that bill, I didn't hear a single word from 
the Senator who had concerns about it, but when I came to the floor to 
ask that the bill be passed again, the senior Senator from New York, 
the Democratic leader, blocked it again. He doesn't think it is bad 
policy. In fact, he admitted it is a good bill. He is not objecting to 
it because it is somehow a partisan bill that hasn't gone through the 
regular order or would increase the national debt. As I said, none of 
these things are true of this legislation.
  The only reason the senior Senator from New York, the Democratic 
leader, objected to this bill is because he is engaging in the kind of 
politics and gamesmanship that really gives Washington, DC, a bad name. 
It is true that my name, like a third of the Senators' names, will be 
on the ballot in November, and Senator Schumer, apparently, is willing 
to punish his constituents in New York State by not allowing this bill 
to pass because he wants to make sure that nobody whose name is on the 
ballot, who happens to be a Republican, can claim any sort of advantage 
by getting a win, legislatively.
  Well, unfortunately, while he is playing those sort of politics and 
games, his own constituents are being harmed, and the American people 
are being deprived of the benefits of this bipartisan legislation. We 
saw this mentality during the President's impeachment trial too. We saw 
how the Democratic leader staged vote after vote--not because he felt 
like he had a shot at getting a conviction of President Trump and a 
removal but strictly to make Senators whose names were going to be on 
the ballot in 2020 look bad. He wanted to get the best 30-second TV 
spot he could possibly get against all Republican Senators running in 
2020.
  He knew he was going to lose on the main impeachment vote, so he 
focused on the one thing that has eluded him for many years, and that 
is, his aspiration to become the next majority leader. Now, in his bid 
to become the next majority leader, our colleague from New York is 
blocking a bill that would bring down drug prices not only in the State 
of Texas but in New York as well and every other State around the 
country.
  I wonder what the Senator's constituents in New York are telling him 
about blocking bipartisan legislation that would actually benefit them. 
This is at the same time that they are trying to figure out how do they 
pay the higher copay or deductible for their prescriptions at the 
pharmacy. We are not even a month and a half into the new year, and 
drug prices are already on the rise, with an average increase of 6 
percent. HUMIRA, which I mentioned earlier, has already gone up 7.4 
percent.
  So it is clear to me that this problem is not going to go away, and 
the time to act is now. I would encourage the Democratic leader to stop 
blocking the bill that his conference Member Senator Blumenthal of 
Connecticut and I have introduced, so we can address these rising costs 
and provide some much needed relief for our constituents.
  My constituents have asked me: What does Congress intend to do 
between now and the election? I usually mention: Well, we can deal with 
the prescription drugs, and we can help bring down the out-of-pocket 
costs. Hopefully, we can pass a highway infrastructure bill that we are 
working on, one that passed unanimously out of the Environment and 
Public Works Committee under the leadership of Senators Barrasso and 
Carper, but the third thing I think we ought to be able to do--and 
really it is a shame it has taken this long to act--is we need to take 
actions to confront the rising healthcare risks associated with e-
cigarettes.