2 Health

State lawmakers are missing the opportunity to fix Minnesota’s glaring health problem

By Lawrence Wright

The most frustrating thing about health care in Minnesota, particularly for racial and ethnic minorities, is that we know what needs to be healed, but policymakers keep trying to fix the wrong malady and won’t deliver a cure for what is truly ailing us.

To quote the state department of health, Minnesota is one of the healthiest states in the nation, but also “has some of the greatest health disparities in the country between whites and people of color and American Indians.” And a look at county health data tells us that AfricanAmericans in Minnesota have a lower life expectancy than whites – by nearly six years in Hennepin County, for example, and over five years in Ramsey County. To close this gap, communities of color in our state need access to high-quality healthcare and affordable prescription medications to

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combat chronic illnesses like heart disease and diabetes.

Members of the Minnesota legislature think they are addressing this problem, but they’re not. The big push this session is to create a prescription drug affordability board that would have the power to impose a price control on prescription drugs.

This is not an effective solution to current health problems our communities are facing. It sounds good politically for lawmakers to say they are lowering the boom on the big drug companies, but in the real world in which everyday people are struggling to pay the out-ofpocket costs for the medicines they need, it isn’t Big Pharma that is deciding what we have to pay.

Today, insurers and pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), the middlemen in the drug supply chain, have the power to determine whether prescription drugs are accessible and affordable. In the PBM sphere, three Fortune 25 corporations control 80 percent of the drug prescribing marketplace. They reap profits from a system in which their revenues are tied to a drug’s