72 Republicans and Democrats in Congress Agree on One Thing: Eli Lilly Has Gone Too Far

Seventy-two members of Congress did something Washington insists is impossible anymore. Republicans and Democrats, 72 of them, joined together to demand the same thing.

Doris Matsui represents Sacramento's urban core. Jack Bergman represents Michigan's rural Upper Peninsula. Different districts, different parties, different sets of constituents, and yet they stood shoulder to shoulder anyway, because both of them know who actually gets hurt when a drug company decides a federal drug discount program is optional.

Seventy more members signed on behind them. That is not a press release. That is a coalition built out of the patients Washington usually forgets, the rural county with one hospital left, the urban safety-net clinic running on fumes, and 72 lawmakers decided those patients were worth fighting for together.

Here is what they're fighting. Who put Eli Lilly in charge of deciding which hospitals get to serve their patients? Because that is functionally what has happened.

Lilly wrote the playbook back in July 2020, when it became the first drug company to restrict 340B drug discount pricing through contract pharmacies. Now it has escalated: cut off discounts entirely for any hospital or clinic that won't hand over claims-level patient dispensing data, a demand Congress never authorized and the 72-member letter says plainly “extends beyond the statutory framework established by Congress.”

Here is what that defiance has bought Eli Lilly's CEO, David Ricks, made $26.6 million in 2023, $29.2 million in 2024, and $36.7 million last year. Lilly's own profit: $5.6 billion in 2021. $20.6 billion last year. Nearly four times higher in four years, on the back of two drugs, Mounjaro and Zepbound, that alone generated $36.5 billion in 2025 sales. That is not success. That is insatiable.

Where does that money come from? Your tax dollars, for one. Medicare opened a new taxpayer-funded “Bridge” pilot program this summer covering three GLP-1 obesity drugs, with a $50 copay for patients and up to $10 billion in taxpayer cost. Manufacturers are positioned to collect as much as $12.6 billion of it, when beneficiary copays are added, depending on participation. Zepbound alone pulled in $4.1 billion in the first quarter of this year, before the Bridge pilot took effect, up 79 percent from a year earlier. Taxpayers are bankrolling Eli Lilly's windfall through Medicare, and Lilly is using part of that windfall to lock nonprofit hospitals out of the discount program built to help them survive.

And the price tag on the drugs driving all of this? Zepbound lists at $1,086 for a 28-day supply. Mounjaro, $1,112. Before any discount, before any rebate, before any negotiation. Nearly $13,000 a year sticker price for a molecule that costs a fraction of that to make.

This isn't hypothetical for the hospitals on the receiving end. Tampa General sued Eli Lilly this summer after the company's data cutoff left the hospital paying 25 to 50 percent more, tens of millions of dollars a year, for drugs it used to get at a discount because Congress said it should. That is not a rounding error. In a nonprofit hospital's budget, that is a maternity ward. That is a rural clinic's lights staying on.

Seventy-two lawmakers asked HHS to fix this in July. Restore the pricing. Enforce the statute. Tell the country whether a drug company gets to hold patient data hostage in exchange for a discount Congress already guaranteed by law. Secretary Kennedy has had nearly 12 weeks to answer 72 members of his own government. He hasn't said a word. An HHS Secretary who built his entire brand on standing up to pharmaceutical companies has gone silent the one time six dozen lawmakers, Republicans and Democrats both, asked him to actually do it.

Eli Lilly made $20.6 billion in profit last year, paid its CEO $36.7 million, and is collecting billions more in taxpayer-funded Medicare money this year alone. And yet Lilly is sticking it hard to America’s rural hospitals and community clinics.