The Pharma Puppets Keeping Your Drug Prices High
By Helen Santoro
May 22, 2025
At least six organizations that claim to champion patient rights have deep financial and operational ties to Big Pharma and work to advance corporate profits. These industry front groups routinely lobby in line with the pharmaceutical industry’s priorities, challenge drug price negotiations in court briefings, and promote the industry’s interests in public statements, according to new research.
The findings are the latest example of how pharmaceutical companies are leveraging the legitimacy of patient advocacy groups to further their corporate aims, which are often in direct conflict with the patient rights such groups claim to support.
A report published this Monday by Patients For Affordable Drugs, a national patient advocacy nonprofit, reveals that six organizations ostensibly dedicated to expanding health research and health care access in fact receive significant funding from the pharmaceutical industry, have leadership with ongoing pharmaceutical industry connections, or both.
“There’s clearly a revolving door between many of these groups and between pharma,” said Merith Basey, executive director of Patients For Affordable Drugs, which does not receive funding from pharmaceutical groups. The groups “tend to then represent the interests of pharma and their shareholders and not of patients,” more than half of whom are struggling to afford their prescription medications.
In effect, these organizations function as industry front groups, echoing the positions of their funders while posing as credible advocacy groups. This includes attacking the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act through public comments, court filings, and lobbying. The law, which was strongly opposed by the pharmaceutical industry, granted Medicare the authority to negotiate lower prices for a list of expensive drugs.
So far this year, the drug industry’s trade association, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), has spent nearly $13 million lobbying on issues including drug pricing reform. Drugmakers have also filed several lawsuits challenging Medicare price negotiations.
The six patient advocacy groups highlighted in the recent report “are posing as independent patient or policy groups while acting as mouthpieces for the drug industry’s agenda,” including undermining the reforms to lower drug prices, according to a press release by Patients For Affordable Drugs. They all have close ties to the pharmaceutical industry, including:
- Fifteen of the Alliance for Aging Research’s 20-person leadership board come from the pharmaceutical industry, including Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson.
- The American Action Forum is a conservative think tank and sister organization to the American Action Network, a group that opposes drug pricing reform and
- has received tens of millions of dollars from PhRMA.
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The Center for Medicine in the Public Interest has long-standing financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry, repeatedly receives money from PhRMA, and opposes Medicare drug pricing negotiations.
The Council for Affordable Health Coverage is managed and operated by the pharmaceutical lobbying firm Horizon Government Affairs. - The Pacific Research Institute, a think tank for “free market” policy solutions funded in part by petrochemical tycoon Charles Koch’s right-wing political network, has received money from the PhRMA and drug companies including Pfizer, AstraZeneca, and GlaxoSmithKline.
- Seniors 4 Better Care is a front for American Prosperity Alliance, a dark money group that donates millions of dollars to conservative political action committees and attacks drug pricing reforms.
These organizations promote industry interests in a variety of ways. The Alliance for Aging Research, for example, filed an amicus brief in a district court “concerning the legality of certain provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act” while the court was deliberating on four separate cases.
The new report also notes that staff members at the Council for Affordable Health Coverage hold positions at their parent lobbying company, Horizon Government Affairs, which actively engages with lawmakers on behalf of PhRMA. Additionally, the American Action Forum has a group of experts that helps Big Pharma churn out industry talking points.
The Council for Affordable Health Coverage “promotes market-based health care, with a long track record of opposing other government-first health care policies consistently rejected by patients and voters, such as Medicare for All, single payer, ‘public option,’ and the so-called ‘Inflation Reduction Act,’” spokesperson Kelly Broadway wrote in an email to The Lever.
“Rather than engage with the substance of [the Pacific Research Institute’s] arguments in favor of market-oriented policies that support…
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