At the behest of the pharmaceutical lobby — and after millions in political donations — Republican lawmakers have defanged rules that would lower the prices of life-saving medicines, amounting to a more than $8 billion windfall for Big Pharma.

A year after the pharmaceutical industry’s top lobbying group delivered a secret multimillion-dollar donation to congressional Republicans, GOP lawmakers quietly defanged rules lowering the price of life-saving medicines.

Weakening these rules helped turn the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America’s (PhRMA) $4 million dark-money contribution into an $8 billion windfall for drugmakers, according to a Congressional Budget Office estimate.

Records obtained by political watchdog group Issue One show that PhRMA last year gave millions to

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