James Love and Andrew Goldman represented KEI on March 16, 2017, in a working group meeting of a subcommittee of the Maryland General Assembly House of Delegates Health & Government Operations Committee, where they testified on HB666 [1]/SB437 [2], a bill that would establish transparency of R&D costs for prescription drugs sold in Maryland.
Vincent DeMarco of at Health Care for All! and Dr. Reshma Ramachandran of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health also testified at the hearing.
[3]
Dr. Reshma Ramachandran converses with colleagues before providing testimony on the bill.
Andrew Goldman presented on how transparency information can be used [4] to create estimates of the costs of individual phases of clinical trials, which could then be compared to the claims made by drug companies. He used the example of Spinraza, a drug that benefited from taxpayer funding and is now sold by Biogen for a price of $750,000 for the first year and $375,000 for every year after.
[5]
Andrew S. Goldman, Esq., samples the local coffee in Annapolis, Maryland, prior to testifying before the House.
James Love provided the members of the committee with information on how companies report R&D costs [6] in their SEC filings, explaining the variety of information that companies disclose to investors.
[7]
Matthew Celantano of Maryland Health Care for All describes the arcane operations of the Maryland General Assembly.