In yet another legislative bid to tackle pay-to-delay deals, the US Senate Appropriations Committee voted yesterday to pass the Preserve Access to Affordable Generic Drugs Act, which was included in the Financial Services and General Government Appropriations bill reported out of the committee. A companion House bill was recently passed as part of the Supplemental Appropriations Act of 2010. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the House bill would save the federal government $2.6 billion over 10 years by reducing drug costs.

“The cost of brand-name drugs rose nearly ten percent last year. In contrast, the cost of generic drugs fell by nearly ten percent. At this time of spiraling health care costs, we cannot turn a blind eye to these anticompetitive backroom deals that deny consumers access to affordable generic drugs,” says Herb Kohl, a Wisconsin Democrat, who first introduced the measure in February 2009, along with Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican.

The move comes as Federal Trade Commission commish Jon Leibowitz lobbies Congress to pass a law that would limit these deals, which the agency is fighting in the courts. However, Leibowitz has largely been stymied. Last week, the Senate passed a $60 billion measure to fund the troop buildup in Afghanistan but, at the last minute, dropped the House bill on pay-to-delay deals. An effort to have a provision in the health care reform legislation to ban the deals was also dropped at the last minute (more background here).

As Leibowitz noted at a Congressional hearing earlier this week, “legislation would be the most effective way to stop these deals.” The issue now, though, is whether the legislation actually goes anywhere. Last October, the US Senate Judiciary passed a compromise measure in a bi-partisan vote of 12 to 7, but that effort would allow settlement agreements between drugmakers if they can prove to a judge by clear and convincing evidence that the deal will not harm competition.

And as The Hill notes, the provision championed by Kohl and Grassley barely survived a challenge yesterday. The committee voted 15 to 15, not to reject an amendment Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Democrat, had proposed to strip the provision from the Financial Services and General Government Appropriations bill. Earlier this week, in fact, Specter was one of several senators who wrote Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to object to the provision. The trade group for generic makers, unsurprisingly, bemoaned the passgage (see here).