White House Unveils Inhaler Price Relief for Asthma Sufferers

WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden on Wednesday announced that as a result of administration efforts, three of the four largest inhaler manufacturers will cap the cost of their products at $35 per month for most patients.

“Twenty-seven million Americans have asthma, including 4 million kids, and the reality is, the price of inhalers is way too high for too many Americans,” the president said during an event held in the Indian Treaty Room of the White House.

“Families can pay anywhere from $200 to $650 a month for inhalers … despite the fact it costs less than $5 to make one,” he continued.

Without an affordable backstop to provide emergency relief for asthma symptoms, Americans make more than 1 million emergency room visits every year, and it is estimated that the cost of treating asthma comes to about $50 million every year, Biden said.

Most galling to the president, however, was the fact that since the Food and Drug Administration first approved aerosol drugs to treat asthma in the mid-1950s, the price of inhalers has increased eightfold while the treatment itself has remained fundamentally the same.

He described the situation as “Big Pharma … playing games with patents and pricing.”

“These big companies try to keep generic companies [out of the inhaler market], and one way they do that is by tweaking the mechanism that allows the medicine to get into your body,” Biden said.

“For example, they slightly changed the cap of the inhaler, and they used the new patent on that cap to block generic drug companies from entering the market,” he said.

As a result, the president said, “Big Pharma is able to charge Americans significantly higher prices and pad their prices.”

He noted that one well-known company sells its inhaler for $49 in the United Kingdom, while selling the same product for $645 in the United States; another company, he said, sells its inhaler for $9 in Germany, but for $286 here.

“Same outfit, same device, and yet they charge 30 times more for [it] in the United States,” Biden said. 

“Thirty times more,” he repeated. “It’s outrageous.”

Joining the president at the event was Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee and a longtime critic of the nation’s large drug manufacturers.

Together they said that GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca and Boehringer Ingelheim have all announced their intention to cap out-of-pocket costs of inhalers at $35 per month. 

In the case of AstraZeneca and Boehringer Ingelheim, the price cap will go into effect on June 1, according to press releases from Sanders’ office.

GlaxoSmithKline, the largest manufacturer of inhaler products in the United States, is slated to begin capping out-of-pocket costs at $35 per month for its asthma and COPD inhalers no later than Jan. 1, 2025. 

The products subject to these caps will include: Advair Diskus, Advair HFA, Anoro Ellipta, Arnuity Ellipta, Breo Ellipta, Incruse Ellipta, Serevent Diskus, Trelegy Ellipta and Ventolin HFA.

“The result of a high cost of prescription drugs is obvious,” Sanders said on Wednesday. “One out of four Americans cannot afford to purchase the prescriptions that their doctors write, and some of them will die.

“Those that don’t will get much sicker than they should, and they’ll wind up in the emergency rooms of hospitals, at great cost to the already overburdened health care system,” the senator continued.

Sanders went on to point out that the high price of prescription drugs is a burden that every taxpayer shares.

“It drives up the cost of Medicaid, Medicare and other public health programs as well as private insurance,” he said.

Despite this, Sanders said, “while politicians have been talking about the high cost of prescription drugs for years, not much has happened.”

“There’s been a lot of talk, but no real progress,” he said. “The drug companies continued to go along their merry way and raise prices anytime they wanted to any level that they wanted for any reason that they wanted.”

Against that backdrop, Wednesday’s announcement on asthma inhaler prices, coupled with other price reductions stemming from the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act and other legislation, “is very good news.”

“Despite all that we have accomplished … it is not enough,” Sanders said. “In the State of the Union address, President Biden called on Congress to pass legislation to cap out-of-pocket prescription drug costs for all Americans at no more than $2,000 a year and to substantially increase the number of drugs that can be negotiated with the pharmaceutical industry. I strongly agree,” Sanders said.

Dan can be reached at [email protected] and @DanMcCue