President Joe Biden finally called on Congress to lower drug prices for people with Medicare and to cap their out-of-pocket drug costs, reports Rachel Cohrs and Lev Facher for Stat News. The President also said he wanted private insurers to be able to benefit from Medicare negotiated drug prices.
Mr. Biden recognizes that fair drug prices are critical to enable Americans to get the health care they need and should have no bearing on the development of new drugs. In a speech last week, he said: “We can make a distinction between developing these breakthroughs and jacking up prices on a range of medications for a range of everyday diseases and conditions.”
The White House released a new document on prescription drugs. However, it did not go into any details on how to set drug prices. It did not call for international reference pricing either. International reference pricing would ensure that Americans paid no more on average for their drugs than people in other wealthy countries.
That said, the document does support a provision in the House of Representatives 2019 bill, H.R. 3, which would allow compulsory licensing of drug patents in instances in which pharmaceutical companies were unwilling to negotiate a drug’s price. In effect, the government could give competing drug companies a license to manufacture the drugs.
In Biden’s words, “[Medicare negotiation] means drug companies would have to sell their drugs to all distributors at the Medicare price, or face up to a 95% excise tax.” He also supports imposing penalties on drug companies that raise their prices higher than the rate of inflation. And, he wants to allow states to import drugs from Canada. Why only Canada?
PhRMA responded in its typical way, even though there is no compelling evidence that lower drug prices would affect innovation. It’s time we heard a chorus of people drowning out PhRMA’s voice and calling out drug companies for charging such high prices that they effectively leave tens of thousands of Americans dead each year.
Mr. Biden actually did just that. When he was vice president and he was leading an effort to cure cancer, he told the pharmaceutical companies that it would be “unacceptable” for them to charge whatever they pleased for a cure. “That means a significant number of people can’t afford it, and they will die without it.”
Of course, as Mr. Biden said, Medicare drug price negotiation would still leave pharmaceutical companies with healthy profits. And, he was not prepared to call for price negotiation of generic drugs. Increasingly, many generic drugs have become extremely expensive.
Here’s more from Just Care:
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