Prescription Drug Affordability Board Activity, November 2025

Vice Chair Amy Burns resigned from the board effective November 16, 2025. Dr. Dan Hartung was the only member nominated and was elected as vice chair. 

Executive Director Sarah Young said a public hearing on prescription drug prices for the drug price transparency program was scheduled for December 4, 2025.

Lorren Sandt, from the Caring Ambassadors Program, spoke about studies showing that setting price controls doesn’t reduce patient out-of-pocket costs, and that insurance plans dictate affordability. She proposed that the board vote to keep the policy recommendation to disband the PDAB. As an alternative, she suggested that the board vote to recommend PBM reform, pharmacy network access, fair reimbursement, and 340B transparency.

Dharia McGrew, from PhARMA, said she appreciated the effort the board put into the cost and utilization trends section of the draft report, but pointed out discrepancies that are not explained well: while some footnotes give reasons for the discrepancies, stakeholders are still questioning the lack of transparency in the methodology that led to the discrepancies.

Jessica McBride, from the Oregon Coalition for Affordable Prescriptions said that rising costs for medicine for Oregonians are due to growing profit margins. She advocated for the board to recommend to the legislature that it have more authority, and cited PDABs in Colorado and Maryland as leaders in the UPL process.

Ranier Simons, from the Community Access National Network, talked about the “uncharacteristic” and last-minute policy recommendation that the board be given UPL authority. He cited board members saying that they don’t support UPLs, and urged them not to continue with this recommendation.

Primo Castro, on behalf of BIO, raised concerns that the premise behind establishing a drug review process was fundamentally flawed and risked creating unintended consequences for patients and the broader ecosystem. He also raised concerns about the data integrity in the draft report.

Staff asked board members to discuss requested changes to the annual report draft before turning to policy recommendations. Vice Chair Hartung raised questions about discrepancies in the graph, saying, “sometimes pretty major qualitative discrepancies in the topline number, in terms of changes in spend, that I think it just erodes the credibility of the overall document.”

Staff offered reasons for these discrepancies, one of which may be that they are trying to compile information from three different sets of submissions by the carriers, or that the data that each carrier reports is based on the top 25 drugs, which may change from year to year.

Still, Vice Chair Hartung was concerned about the discrepancies, questioning whether the information reflected anything important for them to be talking about. Another board member seconded these concerns. Staff reiterated that it was the best data available to them, and that they could not resolve the discrepancies by the end of the year.

The board discussed policy recommendations put forward in past meetings, amended the language in each (shown below), and they voted on each policy item. 

• Policy recommendations 1(a), 2(a), 2(b), 3(b), 3(c) and 7(c) passed unanimously. 
• Policy recommendations 3(a), 4(b), 7(a) each passed (five to one) 
• Policy recommendation 1(c) failed three to two, with one abstention. 4(a)and 6  failed (three to three)
• Policy recommendations 8(a) and 8(b) failed unanimously.

Staff asked the board for comments on edits to the scoring rubric. They discussed the therapeutic alternatives section, and the scoring scale. Staff also reminded the board that discussion about this will be very limited at the January meeting, when they will vote on drugs that are creating affordability challenges.

Staff recapped where the board was in the affordability review process, then pulled up the drug review packet for Vraylar. The board had an extensive discussion about which metrics or lenses to use as a measure of drug affordability. They consulted the staff for guidance, who reminded the board that it was their responsibility to stay updated on the packets and use their own  experience and professional knowledge to determine what affordability means to them. They reviewed expectations for the next meeting and decided that each board member should work independently to decide the drugs they would include or exclude, and present their rationale in the December meeting. 

In a discussion about the insulin packet, the staff found a previously identified error in the data. This was not resolved before the end of the meeting, and staff said they would distribute an updated packet as soon as they found the information needed.