NORTHAMPTON — Around 200,000 Massachusetts residents with heart disease, asthma and diabetes will immediately benefit from lower prescription drug costs included in recently adopted state legislation.

The comprehensive reforms included in “An Act Relative to Pharmaceutical Access, Costs and Transparency,” also known as the PACT Act, are being praised by state Sen. Jacob Oliveira, D-Ludlow, as ways to both reduce costs for residents and improve oversight of the state’s pharmaceutical industry.

“Life-saving drugs are expensive, a lot of times, and so having access to it will save families so much money, and this will impact an estimated couple hundred thousand people in Massachusetts,” Oliveira said Friday. “This is a significant bill, probably one of the most significant bills that we’ve passed in this session.”

For each condition, the bill requires insurers to eliminate cost-sharing requirements for one generic drug and to cap co-payments on one brand-name drug at $25 per 30-day supply. It further brings down consumer costs by ensuring that people are not charged a cost-sharing amount, like a co-pay, if it would be cheaper for them to purchase the drug without using their insurance.

“This is a huge cost savings for people because a family shouldn’t have to choose whether or not they should have their medication or heat in their homes,” Oliveira said. “This will go a long way to help families, particularly seniors, afford a lot of these life-saving medications.”

And he noted that it won’t affect the quality of drugs.

“The research and development is done on these drugs, they have been proven, they have been paid for, and it’s time that we allow folks to have access to it at a reasonable rate,” Oliveira said.

Oliveira represents the towns of South Hadley, Granby and Belchertown in Hampshire County.

U.S. leader

First proposed six years ago, Oliveira said the legislation has been a long time in coming, and makes Massachusetts a leading state in health care access.

Senate President Karen E. Spilka, D-Ashland, praised Sen. Cindy F. Friedman, D-Arlington, Sen. John D. Cronin, D-Fitchburg, her colleagues in the Senate and partners in the House for getting the bill before Gov. Maura Healey.

“If you live with a condition that requires prescription medication, you deserve the right to access that drug, without worrying about how expensive it is or whether it will be available,” Spilka said.

About 9% of Massachusetts residents have diagnosed diabetes, 6.2% of adults over 35 live with heart disease, and, in 2015, more than 10% of residents lived with asthma. The incidence of each condition increases among Black residents, with over 12% living with diabetes and nearly 14% of Black adults living with asthma.

Oliveira said the state bill may also serve to inspire federal legislation looking to hold pharmacy benefit managers, the so-called middlemen, more accountable. The Massachusetts bill increases oversight of benefit managers by authorizing the Division of Insurance to license and regulate them. Pharmacy benefit managers are also prohibited from making payments to pharmacy benefit consultants, or brokers, who work on behalf of health plan sponsors during a contracting or bidding process.

“A lot of the cost drivers that consumers face for prescription drugs have to do with those (pharmacy benefit managers), so increasing the state oversight of them, and giving the Division of Insurance the ability to regulate them in a better way, is something that I hope is passed at the federal level, so not just Massachusetts residents can benefit from it, but everybody in all 50 states can benefit from containing cost,” Oliveira said.

He observed that Democratic U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren has filed similar federal legislation covering pharmacy benefit managers, along with Missouri’s Republican U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley.

“They are different in everything that they advocate for, yet they agree on this because they see that their residents, whether they’re in Missouri or Massachusetts or anywhere in between, are impacted by the high cost of prescription drugs,” Oliveira said.

Further progress eyed

Oliveira said in the office hours he holds in the dozen communities in his Senate district, many of which take place at senior centers, he hears directly from those affected by the high costs of medication. But it’s also personal to him, as his family has a history of heart disease and his father four years ago had double bypass surgery.

He hopes that legislation will go a step further in the next session, with more chronic illnesses addressed and the reliance on both life-saving drugs and medication critical to preventive care.

“When you look at some of these medications, they can help prevent further illnesses down the road,” Oliveira said. “In future legislative sessions, it’s something that all of us are trying to look at, to improve the quality and affordability of health care in Massachusetts.”

Other aspects of the bill include having the Center for Health Information and Analysis collect a range of drug cost information from pharmaceutical manufacturers and benefit managers; including pharmaceutical manufacturers and benefit managers in the Health Policy Commission’s annual health care cost trends hearing for the first time; and establishing the Office for Pharmaceutical Policy and Analysis within the Health Policy Commission.

Scott Merzbach can be reached at smerzbach@gazettenet.com.