Bankrolled by pharmaceuticals, Mike Rogers helped block Medicare price negotiation

Over seven terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, Michigan Republican U.S. Senate nominee Mike Rogers repeatedly voted against allowing Medicare to negotiate lower prices with drug manufacturers. Rogers has received more than $1 million in contributions to his campaigns and his political action committee from the pharmaceutical and health products industry since 1999.

Rogers is running for the open seat of retiring Democratic U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow. His Democratic opponent, U.S. Rep. Elissa Slotkin, helped pass the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which capped monthly insulin out-of-pocket costs for Medicare Part D beneficiaries at $35. This act will begin capping out-of-pocket costs for prescription drugs at $2,000 annually for those beneficiaries and has empowered the federal government to directly negotiate drug prices for people. 

Congress first created Medicare Part D, the prescription drug benefit portion of the safety-net program, in 2003. Rogers was one of 220 representatives — 204 of them Republicans — who voted for the legislation, which contained an industry-backed provision explicitly prohibiting the government from negotiating drug prices. 

In a January 2006 appearance on C-SPAN, Rogers defended the restriction: “What we have found is the free market does work. I mean, it made America great. Why can’t we apply it to the drug costs to get them down? And it’s working. So I argue that, over time, this is an investment we will reap the rewards for. Preventative treatment, those kind of things were built into that bill. Competition is getting in to start holding drug prices down. And if the government negotiates it and sets the price here, competition doesn’t have to go lower than that. That’s where the price will be. So this has been a bit of an experiment, I think, and a good one when it comes to costs.” 

With drug prices outpacing inflation, congressional Democrats have repeatedly attempted to lift the ban on negotiations. In January 2007, Rogers voted against the Medicare Prescription Drug Price Negotiation Act, which passed in the House but was filibustered by Senate Republicans.

According to OpenSecrets, Rogers has received $673,390 over his political career in campaign donations from the pharmaceutical/health products industry. A Michigan Independent analysis of contributions to his Majority Initiative to Keep Electing Republicans (MIKE R) Fund leadership PAC found it got at least another $329,921 in donations from the sector.

A Rogers campaign spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment for this story.

In the early 2000s, many Americans purchased prescription drugs in Canada and other countries, where the same medications were significantly cheaper. Rogers voted in July 2003 against a bill that would have allowed reimportation of drugs from foreign countries. In a Lansing State Journal op-ed the following month, Rogers and then-Rep. Dave Camp (R-MI) repeated industry talking points, warning, “Unmonitored, reimported prescription drugs can and have killed American citizens.”

On Aug. 15, the Biden-Harris administration announced that the first negotiations authorized by the Inflation Reduction Act would bring the list prices of 10 popular drugs down by between 38% and 79% for the Medicare program starting in 2026.  Medicare recipients will save an estimated $1.5 billion. 

“If the new prices had been in effect last year, Medicare would have saved an estimated $6 billion, or approximately 22 percent, across the 10 selected drugs,” the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services said in a press release.