Democrats' Drug Pricing Reform Plans Not Dead Yet
The Build Back Better plan that the White House issued Thursday doesn’t include a proposal to allow Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices, an idea with broad public support that President Joe Biden backs, as do many other Democrats and patient advocates. But Democrats haven’t completely abandoned pricing reforms even as intraparty differences have made it difficult to reach consensus on a plan that can garner enough votes to pass given the party’s narrow majority in the House and an evenly divided Senate.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office is working to drum up support for a version of the plan that would allow Medicare to negotiate prices for a narrower group of drugs, STAT News reports.
The latest proposal is being developed by House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Frank Pallone (D-NJ) and Rep. Scott Peters (D-CA), who had objected to a broader reform plan included in a House version of the Build Back Better plan due to concerns that it would hurt drug development and innovation. "We're going to get a bill that has negotiated prices, and that's going to make a difference in terms of people being able to afford their drugs," Pallone said Thursday evening, according to The Hill.
The new proposal would allow negotiations on medications administered by doctors (Medicare Part B) and at the pharmacy counter (Part D) — but only after the drugs were past the “exclusivity period” granted by the Food and Drug Administration to protect them from competition. “The tentative deal would also penalize drug makers for raising prices faster than inflation in both the employer-sponsored insurance market and Medicare,” STAT’s Rachel Cohrs writes. “Seniors would have their out-of-pocket drug costs capped each year.”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/democrats-drug-pricing-reform-plans-not-dead-yet-reports/ar-AAQ6Z7E