The lawsuit, filed in June 2023, challenged drug price negotiations enacted through the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. Through that act, Congress gave the federal government the power to negotiate prices for certain high-cost drugs under Medicare.
Other plaintiffs included the Ohio Chamber of Commerce, the Michigan Chamber of Commerce and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Chris Kershner, president and CEO Dayton Area Chamber Commerce, said the organization is reviewing the court’s ruling and considering next steps.
“We support access to affordable health care. However, the price controls that we are challenging would reduce access to new medicines Americans are counting on to save and improve their lives and would set a very devastating precedent for Dayton and all U.S. businesses,” Kershner said. “Federal price setting of private industry is a scary and slippery slope.”
The Dayton Area Chamber of Commerce includes more than 2,200 businesses and organizations in a 14-county area surrounding Dayton. The chambers involved in the lawsuit represent members who would be directly subject to the Inflation Reduction Act’s drug price controls, including AbbVie.
AbbVie is a member of the Dayton Area Chamber and the U.S. Chamber, and it has locations in Cincinnati and throughout Ohio. It also markets the drug Imbruvica, which was one of the first drugs selected to take part in Medicare’s drug price negotiations program.
“Pharmacyclics and AbbVie are large pharmaceutical companies that could have sued on their own in a federal court in a different state,” Newman said in his explanation about why the chambers did not have a legal standing to bring forth the lawsuit.
Newman dismissed the Dayton Area Chamber of Commerce’s involvement in the case, saying the chamber lacked “associational standing to bring these claims and must be dismissed from this case.”
“Plaintiffs have provided no information — in their amended complaint or otherwise — directly connecting the interests of Pharmacyclics or AbbVie to the business climate in the Dayton area,” Newman’s dismissal of the case said.
The Dayton Area Chamber of Commerce’s connection to the case was “speculative,” Newman said in his ruling.
“The Program’s potential downstream effects — on unnamed members in the supply chain, and on unknown investment in all pharmaceutical companies — are far too speculative to connect this lawsuit to the business climate of the Dayton area,” Newman said.
If the court found the Dayton Area Chamber of Commerce had standing in this case, Newman said it would “open the door for any individual or company to bypass venue rules by becoming a member of any association remotely related to a challenged law or regulation.”
The list of drugs selected by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) for negotiations will grow over time.
For the participating drug companies, negotiations took place last year and were ongoing this year 2024. Any negotiated prices will become effective beginning in 2026, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said.
For the drugs selected in August 2023 to be part of the negotiations, Medicare enrollees paid a total of $3.4 billion in out-of-pocket costs in 2022 for those drugs.
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