Scott Powers
A national organization fighting for reduced costs for prescription drugs announced Tuesday it is launching a television campaign to support the re-election of Republican U.S. Rep. Francis Rooney.
Patients For Affordable Drugs Action, a new nonpartisan super political action committee opened for this election cycle, said it is making a six-figure buy on broadcast and cable television advertising to encourage voters that Rooney is standing up for them by engaging in bipartisan efforts to lower drug prices.
Rooney faces Democrat David Holden of Naples in the battle for Florida’s 19th Congressional District in southwest Florida
“We want voters in Congressman Francis Rooney’s district to know that he is standing with patients for lower prescription drug prices,” David Mitchell, a cancer patient and the founder of Patients For Affordable Drugs Action, stated in the news release. “He is the only Republican House member to support legislation to let Medicare negotiate for lower drug prices, and he backs important bipartisan legislation to speed cheaper generics to market.”
Through its most recent federal campaign financing reports, Patients For Affordable Drugs Action has spent $2 million nationally on six other congressional and U.S. Senate races, supporting one Democrat and one Republican, and opposing two Democrats and two Republicans, according to the Center for Responsive Politics in Government.
The group’s money has come almost entirely from another committee called the Action Now Initiative. Ballotpedia reports Dallas billionaires John and Laura Arnold of Dallas founded that group.
