Paper industry, drugmakers spar over requirement to print prescribing information

Drugmakers are resuming their annual lobbying battle with the paper industry over an obscure clause slipped into a key spending bill.

The House Appropriations Committee’s legislation to fund the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), advanced last week, includes a provision preventing the agency from digitizing prescribing information.

The FDA first proposed a rule in 2014 that would have eliminated paper prescribing information. But Congress, spurred on by paper industry lobbyists, has passed a rider blocking the agency from implementing the rule in every appropriations bill since 2015.

Team modernization: The Alliance to Modernize Prescribing Information, a group of pharmaceutical companies, is lobbying lawmakers to remove the provision when the bill goes to the House floor.

A spokesperson for the Alliance called the measure “essentially an earmark for the multi-million dollar paper lobby,” arguing that Congress’s rule mandates paper waste and that paper labels provide pharmacists with outdated information.

Team paper: The Pharmaceutical Printed Literature Association, which represents companies involved in the printed prescribing information (PI) supply chain, is the leading paper industry group backing Congress’s rule.

The association told The Hill that health care professionals prefer printed PI, and that rural communities lacking broadband internet cannot reliably access the information online.