Drug-price ballot issue faces more scrutiny

By Alan Johnson
The Columbus Dispatch
Monday January 4, 2016 7:53 PM

The fight over a potential statewide ballot issue to keep down prescription drug prices has begun with major pharmaceutical companies firing the first salvo.

Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted on Monday ordered county boards of election to take a second look at the Drug Price Relief Act because of potential problems, including thousands of crossed-out signatures.

The AIDS Healthcare Foundation, the group sponsoring the initiated statue ballot issue, prematurely claimed success last week, saying it had submitted 116,105 valid signatures and Husted had certified the issue to forward to the General Assembly. The foundation acknowledged it expected the issue to be certified, having exceeded the minimum 91,677 signatures required.

Instead of certifying, however, Husted told boards of election to do another review by Jan. 29.

Acting on information from a Columbus law firm representing PhRMA, a powerful national pharmaceutical trade organization, Husted’s office found two potential problems in the petition. One was crossed-out signatures of people who signed 5,598 “part-petitions,” which are individual sections of the total petition. The second issue involved pages where the petition circulator said they verified 28 names on a page when in fact there was only one name on the page.

Husted spokesman Josh Eck said the secretary has not concluded the petition is invalid or won’t have sufficient signatures, only that it needs to be reviewed again by boards of election, which examined, tallied, and submitted the petition to the secretary’s office last week.

Michael Weinstein, executive director of the AIDS group, called Husted’s action “completely bogus and politically motivated. We’ll go to court to overturn it.”

He said the crossed-out signatures resulted from pre-checking and finding many names were invalid. “We shouldn’t be punished for that.”

Weinstein blamed the hangup on PhRMA, which he said is spending $38 million to oppose a similar issue in California.

“If PhRMA thinks they’re going to intimidate us by these actions, they’re sorely mistaken. Ohioans are suffering badly as a result of high drug prices. We don’t mind a fair fight.”

The AIDS Healthcare Foundation submitted an initiated statute asking state lawmakers to enact a law requiring the state and state-funded agencies to pay no more for prescription drugs than the lowest price paid by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. If the legislature fails to act in four months, the foundation, the world's largest provider of drugs and health care for HIV/AIDS patients, would be permitted to collect another 91,677 signatures to put the issue on the ballot in the November election.

The issue is aimed at lowering the cost drugs for AIDS, hepatitis C and other chronic diseases.

The potential ballot problems came to light as a result of a Dec. 30 letter sent to Husted’s office by Christopher N. Slagle, an attorney with the Bricker & Eckler law firm, representing PhRMA. Slagle said in his letter that the secretary should not submit a flawed petition to state lawmakers because it could lead to “a perversion of the democratic process and an incentive to engage in election fraud.”