Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Perspectives: In Taking On Big Pharma, Biden Needs To Channel FDR's Grit
The Hill: Like FDR, Biden Should Welcome Their Hatred
President Joe Biden and his agenda are appropriately inspiring comparisons to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. Biden himself has welcomed the comparisons, even traveling to Warm Springs, Ga., FDR’s famous getaway, to give a speech just one week before the 2020 election. Biden is on the verge of proving those comparisons correct — if he, like FDR, stands strong against wealthy special interests. If Biden is successful in enacting a bold Build Back Better package, he will cement his place in history. Future historians will explain that Biden effectively built on Roosevelt’s legacy in important and ambitious ways. (Nancy Altman, 9/21)
The Guardian: Guess What The Three Democrats Blocking Lower Medication Prices Have In Common?
The three conservative Democratic lawmakers threatening to kill their party’s drug pricing legislation have raked in roughly $1.6m of campaign cash from donors in the pharmaceutical and health products industries. One of the lawmakers is the House’s single largest recipient of pharmaceutical industry campaign cash this election cycle, and another lawmaker’s immediate past chief of staff is now lobbying for drugmakers. The threat from Democratic representatives Kurt Schrader (Oregon), Scott Peters (California) and Kathleen Rice (New York) comes just as the pharmaceutical industry’s top lobbying group announced a seven-figure ad campaign to vilify the Democratic legislation, which aims to lower the cost of medicines for Americans now facing the world’s highest prescription drug prices. (David Sirota and Andrew Perez, 9/20)
Rexburg Standard Journal: Prescription Drug Prices: Politicians Are All Talk, No Action
On July 26, 2020, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order under which the US government’s Medicare Part D program would have negotiated lower prescription drug prices based on an “International Price Index.” Implementation of the order was delayed pending counter-proposals from Big Pharma, but the Democratic response was swift. “Instead of meaningfully lowering drug prices, President Trump’s Executive Orders would hand billions of dollars to Big Pharma,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) complained, without explaining why or how. (Thomas Knapp, 9/16)
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: Time Has Come To Bargain Drug Prices
For years, elected leaders have occasionally called for the federal government to begin negotiating the price of prescription drugs for Medicare. The idea has come around once again, this time in the form of a Biden administration proposal. The plan would finally allow the federal government to bargain the prices for prescription drugs — something so obviously sensible it often baffles consumers to imagine any buyer not negotiating. The Health and Human Services Department proposal would not only bring down the cost of drugs for the federal government but also for all consumers. (9/17)
The Wall Street Journal: Biden’s Price Controls Will Make Good Health More Expensive
Democrats are looking for ways to finance their $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill and one plan is to put price controls on prescription drugs. If enacted, these policies would harm patients enormously. Far from saving money, price controls would make better health more expensive. The Biden White House has proposed requiring Medicare to “negotiate” drug prices. Companies face a tax as high as 95% on sales if they don’t concede to the government price, meaning this isn’t a negotiation but a demand. Drug companies would have to offer commercial insurers the same rates. The plan would also tie price increases to inflation, which will only translate to higher prices for drugs at launch. (Tomas J. Philipson, 9/15)
Also —
The New York Times: Our Generic Drug Supply Is Sick
The American health care system is built on the idea that a pill is a pill. Generic drugs are considered equal to and interchangeable with one another — and also with the name brand. This gospel has existed since 1984, when a law known as Hatch-Waxman was passed, allowing companies to make drugs that had gone off patent without having to replicate the same expensive clinical trials. For the most part, all they had to do was prove that the generic was manufactured using good practices and worked in the body in a similar way, within an acceptable range. Hatch-Waxman has been a stunning success. Americans have grown increasingly comfortable with generic medications, which now represent 90 percent of the prescriptions that are filled in this country. Their widespread use has translated into trillions of dollars in savings. Politicians and experts agree that any hope we have for affordable, universal health care rests on generic drugs. (Farah Stockman, 9/18)
