Poll shows Arizonans want Congress to act on lowering prescription drug prices

A new poll conducted by OH Predictive Insights shows that Arizonans want Congress to act on lowering prescription drug prices, which is included in the budget currently being considered on Capitol Hill. We talked about this new survey, and the issue of prescription drug prices, with Arizona AARP state director Dana Marie Kennedy and Mike Noble, Chief of Research and Managing Partner for OH Predictive Insights.

“We wanted to find out specifically first hand what exactly Arizonans believed, and if they supported allowing Medicare to negotiate, if they had believed it was a problem, we wanted to find out how many people weren’t billing their medications,” Kennedy said.

Kennedy said she has been working to lower prescription drug prices since 1998, and that this issue is unfinished business for her.

“We found that 65% or 2/3 of voters were concerned about the affordability of prescription drug prices,” Noble said.

Noble said some of the demographic disparities were surprising, such as people who had higher incomes and people who were already on Medicare didn’t suffer from drug prices as much. Drug prices across party lines were seen as an obstacle for everyone.

“I almost fell out of my chair because its just something we don’t see as often as these two parties have just been at each other for these last few years, so to see something that just all parties overwhelmingly agree on is just a political no-brainer and it kind of begs the question of why this hasn’t happened yet,” Noble said.

Kennedy said she was both surprised and unsurprised about the poll results, as she has seen firsthand the issues with drug prices.

“The fact that 94% of Arizonans believe that Medicare should be able to negotiate, they don’t understand why we can’t get the lowest price possible,” Kennedy said.