Remembering David Mitchell

David Mitchell, who founded and led Patients for Affordable Drugs, passed away on January 2 at the age of 75.

CREDIT: Patients for Affordable Drugs

Those of us in the advocacy and truth-telling business lost a fellow warrior earlier this month.

David Mitchell, who founded and led Patients for Affordable Drugs and like me did PR work for many years, passed away on January 2 at his home in Maryland at the age of 75.

I first met David when I was still a Cigna executive and he was still at the DC-based communications firm he helped found in the mid 1980s, GMMB, after having served as head of communications for the United Auto Workers union. The firm would grow to become a powerhouse in Washington, in part because of its close connections to Democrats. One of the firm’s recent clients was the Biden-Harris campaign.

I got to know David because of one of GMMB’s previous clients, America’s Health Insurance Plans, the big industry PR and lobbying group that now goes by the name AHIP. We met at an AHIP conference about 20 years ago. I remember it vividly because we were introduced by AHIP’s VP of communications at the time, Susan Pisano, on the veranda of the swanky Hotel del Coronado on an island near San Diego where “Some Like It Hot” had been filmed decades earlier. (Insurance executives like to stay at nice places, and our premium dollars enable them to do that.) I was there representing Cigna and as a member of AHIP’s strategic communications committee.

A few years later, in early 2008, I confided in Susan that I was planning to leave Cigna but hadn’t figured out my next career move. She suggested I talk to David, and a few days later, I was meeting with him in his Georgetown office overlooking the Potomac. I wasn’t expecting a job offer and didn’t get one. But he did suggest that there might be some role I could play if the Democrats took back the White House and Congress later that year and tried to get an ambitious health care reform bill passed. I’ll always be grateful to David for planting that seed.

A few years after that, David would leave GMMB after being diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a kind of blood cancer. He fought it relentlessly and would live another 15 years, but, sadly, it finally took him.

David would be among the millions of Americans who, even with health insurance, have to pay hundreds and often thousands of dollars a year out of their own pockets for their treatments and medications. As the New York Times wrote in an obituary earlier this week:

By 2016, his medications were costing $300,000 a year. He was able to cover that through his insurance, but he knew that many others could not. He grew frustrated, then angry.

He decided he was in a position to do something. He understood public relations, having spent decades leading campaigns on a wide range of public health issues, including tobacco, drunk driving and immunization awareness.

What David did was launch a nonprofit called Patients for Affordable Drugs and become a very visible and effective advocate for reform. He testified before Congress several times and did countless media interviews.

Thanks in large part to David and the work of Patients for Affordable Drugs, Congress finally passed legislation, in 2022, to allow the Medicare program to negotiate directly with pharmaceutical companies to lower the prices of several prescription medications. That bill also set an annual out-of-pocket cap of $2,000 for prescription drugs for Medicare beneficiaries. David himself benefited from that bill. As the Times noted, before the bill was enacted, he had been paying more than $16,000 out of his own pocket for his medications, even with his insurance.

David inspired many of us to keep fighting for a more just health care system. Among other things, dozens of organizations have come together to support legislation to extend that $2,000 annual cap on prescription medications to people who are enrolled in private health plans. As we reported a few weeks ago, Rep. Jake Auchincloss (D-Mass.) introduced a bill that would do exactly that.

Thank you, David, for who you were and for all you did.