| Hello John, Prescription drugs can be expensive.
But there’s good news: The Food and Drug Administration is taking steps to unleash one of the most powerful forces for bringing those prices down — competition.
- In recent weeks, the FDA has issued new guidance aimed at making it easier and more predictable for generic drug manufacturers to bring competing medicines to market.
- The agency is also working to streamline approval of “complex generics” — drugs that can be especially difficult and expensive for competitors to develop.
Why does that matter?
Because when more competitors enter the market, prices tend to fall.
Generic drugs already account for 9 out of every 10 prescriptions filled in America. And FDA research has found that prices generally decline as additional generic competitors enter the market.
It’s not hard to understand why.
When only one company sells a drug, patients have little choice but to pay the price it sets. Introduce a competitor, and each manufacturer has an incentive to offer a better price. As more competitors enter the market, the pressure to lower prices grows.
That’s how competition works throughout the economy. And it can work in health care, too.
Unfortunately, government policies can make it unnecessarily difficult for that competition to take hold.
Developing a generic drug requires navigating a complicated FDA approval process, with complex generics facing even greater regulatory uncertainty. And the FDA itself acknowledges that some brand-name manufacturers have exploited loopholes to delay generic competition and extend their monopolies beyond what Congress intended.
The result? Fewer choices and higher prices for patients.
That’s why the FDA’s recent actions are encouraging. Its Drug Competition Action Plan is designed to:
- Streamline standards for complex generics
- Prevent tactics that delay generic entry
- Make the approval process faster and more predictable
- Maintain the same rigorous safety standards
It’s a fundamentally different approach from government price controls.
Price controls assume that politicians and bureaucrats are smarter than the market and can determine what medicines should cost. That approach has never worked.
Competition takes a different approach: Give multiple companies the opportunity to offer patients a better deal.
And unlike government price-fixing, competition encourages companies to keep finding ways to produce medicines more efficiently and deliver greater value.
There’s a larger lesson here for health care.
Too often, policymakers see high prices and immediately respond with more government intervention. But before creating another mandate, regulation, or price control, they should ask a simpler question:
Is there something preventing more companies from competing?
Whether it’s prescription drugs, hospitals, insurance, or primary care, Americans benefit when government removes unnecessary barriers and gives innovators the freedom to offer something better.
The FDA is taking steps in the right direction. Congress should build on that progress. To get there, lawmakers should support reforms that ...
- Remove barriers to generic and biosimilar competition
- Bring more choices to patients
- Lower prescription drug costs through competition — not government price controls
So please contact your members of Congress and tell them to support reforms that increase competition and lower your health care costs. | 
