Rep. Scott Peters (D-CA): $860,465 in Career Pharmaceutical Donations Alongside Votes to Limit Medicare Drug Price Negotiation

Rep. Scott Peters has represented California’s San Diego-area district since 2013. He sits on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, the primary House panel overseeing pharmaceutical regulation. Over his career, the pharmaceutical and health products industry has become his second-largest donor category, contributing $860,465 to his campaigns. Investigative reporting from STAT News, KFF Health News, The Lever, and Jacobin has documented the timing of those contributions alongside his votes on Medicare drug pricing legislation.

Who Has Donated and How Much

Peters’ pharmaceutical donors include Eli Lilly, Pfizer, Merck, AstraZeneca, Amgen, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson and Johnson, and Gilead Sciences, all companies regulated by the committee where he serves.

In the first half of 2021, Peters received $63,900 from pharmaceutical sources, more than any other member of Congress during that period, according to KFF Health News.

On May 3, 2021, Peters co-led a letter with nine other moderate House Democrats challenging the Medicare drug price negotiation provisions in H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act. According to STAT News, drug industry lobbyists described the letter as a potential fatal blow to the package. In the two days following that letter, May 3 to May 5, 2021, Peters received $19,600 from pharmaceutical industry CEOs and lobbyists.

In the 2022 election cycle, Peters topped all House members and candidates in pharmaceutical contributions at $88,550. During the 2023-2024 cycle, he received more than $133,000 from pharmaceutical and health products donors, placing him among the top 20 congressional recipients from the industry, according to Jacobin.

An additional financial connection: Peters’ wife serves as president and CEO of Cameron Holdings, an investment firm whose portfolio includes companies that provide manufacturing and packaging services to pharmaceutical companies, as reported by Jacobin and The Lever.

The Votes on Drug Pricing

Peters had voted for an earlier version of H.R. 3 in 2019. He stated publicly that he cast that vote knowing the bill had no path to passage in a Republican-controlled Senate and described his support as an effort to “start a conversation about lowering the cost of prescription drugs.”

In 2021, with Democrats holding narrow House and Senate majorities, his position changed.

On September 15, 2021, Peters voted against the drug pricing provision during the House Energy and Commerce Committee markup. His vote, combined with votes from two other Democrats and all Republicans present, produced a 29-29 tie. That tie killed the measure in committee, preventing it from reaching the House floor for a vote.

Peters stated his opposition was based on concerns about international reference pricing, a mechanism in H.R. 3 that would have capped U.S. drug prices at 120 percent of the average price in six countries: Australia, Japan, Canada, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom. He proposed a narrower alternative under which Medicare could negotiate prices only for drugs that had lost exclusive marketing rights and faced no generic competitors.

In August 2022, Peters voted for the Inflation Reduction Act, which included a more limited version of Medicare drug price negotiation. Peters has stated that his legislative framework was incorporated into that final bill.

During 2023 and 2024, Peters cosponsored legislation that would further narrow the Inflation Reduction Act’s drug pricing reforms. The bills include the ORPHAN Cures Act (H.R. 5539), which would exclude orphan drugs from Medicare price negotiations, and the MINI Act (H.R. 5547), which would delay negotiations for certain small-molecule drugs developed using genetically targeted technology, according to Jacobin’s reporting.

What This Has Cost Constituents

H.R. 3 would have granted Medicare broad authority to negotiate drug prices across a wide range of medications. The more limited version that became law through the Inflation Reduction Act covers a smaller set of drugs under more constrained conditions.

The six countries used as reference benchmarks in H.R. 3 consistently pay significantly less than American consumers for the same brand-name medications. Medicare beneficiaries in Peters’ district and across California continue to pay prices for many drugs that fall outside the IRA’s negotiation framework entirely, including drugs that would have been covered under H.R. 3.

California’s 50th Congressional District includes a substantial share of retirees and Medicare enrollees in the San Diego area. For those residents, the difference between H.R. 3’s negotiation framework and the more limited law that passed represents a direct and measurable difference in annual out-of-pocket costs at the pharmacy.

What You Can Do

Voters in California’s 50th Congressional District can contact Rep. Peters’ San Diego office directly to share their views on pharmaceutical pricing legislation. His full voting record is publicly available on Congress.gov.

To compare Peters’ donor patterns against his voting record in more detail, or to research your own representative’s contribution history, visit the tools at /take-action.