New Pharmaceutical Pricing Executive Orders Are Popular
By Sean McElwee, Monika Nayak, and John Ray
At the end of last week, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren’s Presidential campaign released her Medicare transition plan. While the debate around healthcare reform continues across the political divide, one area of her transition plan that has not yet garnered as much attention concerns new provisions for pharmaceutical pricing that would direct confront industry giants like Eli Lilly.
Data for Progress has recently fielded several surveys on pharmaceutical policy in the United States. Each survey included a battery of items concerning policies designed to manage the price and availability of pharmaceutical drugs. Here, we summarize the results.
Pharmaceutical pricing is one of the most important issues to American voters, and recent Data for Progress polling shows voters support expanding the government’s role in lowering the prices of pharmaceutical drugs. Our polling shows this holds true even when it comes to granting the government significant new leverage points over pharmaceutical companies in determining the prices of drugs. In our latest round of polling, we pressed voters on policy specifics pertaining to executive actions the next President might take on the prices of pharmaceutical drugs in the United States.
Voters support executive action to lower pharmaceutical drug prices
At the outset of a recent survey, we asked voters whether they would support or oppose two potential executive actions to help lower the price of pharmaceutical drugs. The first asked about allowing the government to buy certain pharmaceutical patents, for common and life-saving drugs like insulin and epinephrine, through an executive order issued by the President. We asked,
Would you [support or oppose] the next President using their executive authority to order the government to buy, at fair market value, the patents for common and life-saving pharmaceutical drugs, like insulin and epinephrine, from pharmaceutical companies? This would enter those patents into the public domain, allowing any company to sell the drugs at a lower price, even if the original patent holder did not want the patent to be made public.
Voters could report if they strongly supported, somewhat supported, were unsure, somewhat opposed, or strongly opposed that item, and the item rotated the “support or oppose” or the “oppose or support” phrasing, as is typical with our surveys.
An executive order of this kind enjoys clear support among voters, with 53 percent overall supporting such an executive order and just 23 percent opposing it. This includes net support among Independents and a statistical tie among Republican voters, 37 percent of whom support and 37 percent of whom oppose such a policy. Across the full sample, about 1 in 4 voters remain undecided on such an executive order, indicating significant room for movement on the question of allowing the government to buy patents for pharmaceutical drugs.
The next executive order we asked about concerned ordering pharmaceutical companies to reapply for patents if the government was involved in funding the development of the drug. The logic behind this executive order would be to allow the government to negotiate favorable terms for these patents, to help lower the price of common drugs like insulin and epinephrine. We asked voters,
Would you [support or oppose] the next President using their executive authority to order pharmaceutical companies to reapply for patents for their drugs, if they used government funding to develop those drugs? This would allow the government to renegotiate the terms of those patents, which the government could use to require companies to sell common and life-saving drugs like insulin and epinephrine at a lower price.
Voters support such an executive order by a 52-18 margin, including about 3 in 4 Democrats, a majority of Independents, and half of Republican voters. Net support for this executive order is positive across the partisan spectrum, at about +71 net support among Democrats, +37 among Independents, and about +18 among Republicans.
Voters support reforming the pharmaceutical pricing system, even if it requires unilateral action by the next President. Support for letting the government negotiate the price of some common and life-saving pharmaceutical drugs remains high, as we have found in prior surveys. While support for an expanded government role in the pricing of pharmaceutical drugs is clearly highest among Democrats, we find that majorities of Independents and net pluralities of Republicans support a greater role for government as well.
Drug pricing message test
In another of our surveys that focused on pharmaceutical polling, we asked respondents whether they would support the President using their executive authority to end the patent of ten specific expensively-priced drugs. As with our other message tests, this included a set of partisan arguments. Here, we asked voters,
Some Democrats have argued that the next President should use their executive authority to end the patents on ten drugs, including insulin. They argue that ending the patents will allow other companies to create generic versions of drugs, adding competition to the market and reducing the cost of drugs.
Republicans argue that this would reduce the incentives for drug manufacturers to invest in new drugs and destroy jobs in the pharmaceutical sector.
Would you [support or oppose] the next President using their executive authority to end the patents of ten drugs?
We found that almost half of respondents supported this proposition, with 26 percent of voters reporting they were unsure how they felt overall and another 26 percent of voters either somewhat or strongly opposing the policy. Net support for an executive order to end the patents on a few common and life-saving drugs was overwhelmingly positive, with voters supporting such a move by a +22 point margin.
Broken out by party identification, fully 63 percent of Democrats supported such an executive order with just 12 percent opposing it. Republicans indicated greater opposition with 43 percent saying they opposed executive action to end the ten drug patents and 33 percent in support. 37 percent of Independents supported this use of executive authority; 23 percent opposed; 40 percent were unsure. This item continued to portray the trends we observed in previous questions where Independents are more unsure than their partisan counterparts on issues of executive action in pharmaceutical reform.
Voters across the political spectrum are ready for reforms to lower the prices of pharmaceutical drugs in the United States. This includes reforms that explicitly call for unilateral action by the President. Support for such reforms has been relatively high and stable over the past few rounds of Data for Progress polling.
Sean McElwee (@SeanMcElwee) is a Co-Founder and the Executive Director of Data for Progress,
Monika Nayak (@monikayak) is a Political Analyst at YouGov Blue
John Ray (@johnlray) is a Senior Political Analyst at YouGov Blue
One of these surveys, conducted on behalf of Data for Progress by YouGov Blue, fielded on YouGov’s online panel and included 1,216 US voters. The survey fielded from November 9, 2019 - November 11, 2019. The results were weighted to be representative of the population of US voters by age, race/ethnicity, sex, education, US Census region, and 2016 US Presidential vote choice. The second of these surveys was conducted by YouGov Blue as part of its registered voter omnibus and fielded on YouGov’s panel from November 16, 2019 - November 18, 2019 and included 962 voters. The results were weighted to be representative of the population of US voters by age, race/ethnicity, sex, education, US Census region, and 2016 US Presidential vote choice.