Democrats have been campaigning for 30 years on promises they'd let Medicare directly negotiate the cost of prescription drugs. Now, after all that time, they might finally be about to achieve it.
Democrats have been campaigning for 30 years on promises they'd let Medicare directly negotiate the cost of prescription drugs — and after all that time, they might finally be about to achieve it.The Senate's reconciliation bill would only open up negotiations for a small number of drugs, but even that is a threshold Democrats have never before been able to cross. And it opens the door to more aggressive policies in the future.
Federal law has prohibited Medicare from directly negotiating how much it will pay for drugs since 2003.the prohibition and empowering the secretary to negotiate is a historic precedent, and is something to protect and strengthen over time,” said Chris Jennings, a health policy advisor to Presidents Clinton and Obama.The version of price negotiations contained in the Senate's bill is much narrower than most of those ambitious campaign proposals.
“A baby step is the way I would describe this,” said Zeke Emanuel, a health policy advisor to former President Obama and chair of the department of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania. “We’re talking about 10 drugs and moving up at the end of the decade to a whopping 20 drugs. And unless they can get insulin included, how many people are going to be affected is, I think, a big question," he said.now, however, future administrations and Congress could expand them and make more drugs subject to negotiations.
And despite the limitations built into the measure, the drug industry is still warning that it will have a disastrous impact.The drug industry and its allies have long argued that these sorts of policies — which they say are more like price controls than price negotiations — would weaken the incentives for smaller biotech firms to the take scientific risks required to develop new drugs.estimated that under Democrats’ plan, the number of drugs introduced to the U.S.
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