It's time for the government to get tough with Big Pharma. As we approach the third year of a pandemic, drug companies began the new year by hiking the prices of almost 450 life-saving and life-sustaining medications, undeterred by the financial hardship and health challenges facing Americans today. Though many of those drugs were paid for with our tax dollars, Big Pharma still price gouged suffering patients.

Congress has repeatedly promised to address prescription drug price gouging, yet it still allows the industry to dictate astronomical prices for brand-name drugs in our country. If that continues, patients, workers, employers, and taxpayers will keep shouldering the burden of prices that are nearly three times what people in comparable nations pay. Now, more than ever, it's time for Congress to act.

• Permitting Medicare to negotiate for lower drug prices,
  
• Capping copays and out-of-pocket costs for beneficiaries, and
  
• Limiting annual price increases on life-saving and life-sustaining drugs to the rate of inflation for all Americans.

More than 80 percent of Americans support these drug pricing reforms.  

In the face of slim margins in the Senate, the current path to pass these critical reforms is through reconciliation. These reforms already have the support of all 50 Senate Democrats. Congress can pass these drug pricing reforms in short order and move the nation in a new direction, providing savings to patients, taxpayers, workers, employers, and the federal and state governments.

Enacting the drug price reforms agreed upon in the Build Back Better package will mark a truly historic shift in U.S. drug pricing policy. Not only will it break the pharmaceutical industry's unilateral power to dictate prices to the American people, it will save lives, improve health, fight inflation, and put more money back into the pockets of American seniors, workers, and businesses.

Sign the petition: Demand that Congress take action now to lower the cost of prescription drugs.