Abigail Spanberger went the disingenuous route in defending her decision to veto legislation that would create a Prescription Drug Affordability Board in Virginia, claiming that the boards are “expensive undertakings that other states have either repealed or are considering repealing due to costs and ineffectiveness.”
Her office expected, and rightly so, that the media would just report her statement, without pushback.
I’ve found one state that repealed its PDAB – New Hampshire, which made that move last year, as the state balanced its budget by cutting $51 million from its Department of Health and Human Services, with the cuts not just impacting the state’s PDAB, but also residential youth programs, in-home support services for at-risk families and cold-weather shelters.
Question: is Spanberger going to next get rid of our residential youth programs, in-home support services for at-risk families and cold-weather shelters because of “costs and ineffectiveness”?
Stop it with the gaslighting, already.
ICYMI
And yes, there are additional repeal bills in states that have created PDABs, which isn’t surprising – Big Pharma has plenty of money to get its legislative priorities in front of decisionmakers.
And when Big Pharma doesn’t get its way through legislative efforts, it takes states that have PDABs in place to court, the goal there being, to either kill the boards through a judicial order, or at the least, bog down the process so that it can then be claimed, see, we told you, these things don’t work.
In Virginia, Spanberger, first, tried to amend the PDAB legislation to delay it from taking effect until 2030, after her single term in office, which legislators rejected, daring her, in essence, to follow the lead of her MAGA predecessor, Glenn Youngkin, who, twice, vetoed PDAB bills, in 2024 and 2025.
Which she did.
“I offered amendments to the General Assembly that would have directed the Prescription Drug Affordability Advisory Panel to study a reference-based pricing system before the state spends millions of dollars on implementation,” Spanberger said in her veto statement, released by her office on Tuesday, detailing what was basically a delaying tactic.
Pro tip: if you want to pretend you support something, like, say, lowering prescription-drug costs, but you don’t want to bite the hand that feeds you money-wise, you call for a study to be done – so that we can spend time and money on a report that ends up gathering dust on a shelf.
To Big Pharma, time and money funded by state taxpayers on a study is much better than them having to pay lawyers to take a state with a PDAB to court or having to finance a PDAB repeal effort with campaign contributions.
The problem I have with this is, the price from Spanberger to sell her soul was so low – her gubernatorial campaign received a smidge more than $250,000 from the pharmaceuticals industry, according to data from the Virginia Public Access Project, which also details a $50,000 contribution to her inaugural committee from the Pharmaceutical Research & Manufacturers of America, which goes by the brand name PhRMA.
That ain’t a lot, in the grand scheme.
PhRMA loves Spanberger for doing what it paid her pennies on the dollar to do on its behalf.
“The governor offered thoughtful, substantive recommendations, and after the General Assembly failed to heed them, her veto was the right step to protect Virginia patients from a flawed policy that may do little to lower what they actually pay at the pharmacy counter,” Will May, the senior director of PhRMA, said in a statement.
Note his careful language there: PDABs “may do little” to lower prescription drug costs.
Why wasn’t he going as far as our own supposed Democrat governor on that point?
Probably because he knows better.
Big Pharma isn’t opposed to PDABs because they’re bad for consumers; PDABs are bad for their bottom line, is why they oppose them.
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Chris Graham
