Vermont Governor Jim Douglas says the federal government must get moving in issuing standards of the manufacture of generic insulin and human growth hormone.
Douglas and his counterparts in three others states are asking the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to issue long-delayed guidelines on the production of the drugs.
He says doing so would help spur competition and eventually drive down prices, shaving hundreds of millions of dollars from the nearly two billion dollars spent on the two biotechnology drugs each year. He was joined in his request by the governors of Kansas, Minnesota and Wisconsin.
The governors say the guidelines were drafted in 2002 but still haven’t been released.