The legislation, which would also require insurers to provide regulators with spending data on prescription medicines, comes amid escalating national anger over the rising cost of drugs. The topic has become a talking point in the presidential campaign. And the Obama administration recently proposed an experiment for lowering the cost of some Medicare drugs.
A growing number of state legislatures, however, are trying to take matters into their own hands. Several have — with varying degrees of success — introduced bills to require drug makers to disclose costs, since the pharmaceutical industry argues pricing is used to recover high R&D costs. California, in fact, is one of the states to have considered such a bill, but that went nowhere twice in the past year.
