Bernie Sanders making plans to push prescription drug reforms through reconciliation
By Ryan Nobles, CNN
March 22, 2021
Excerpt:
Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont and the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, is set to unveil a trio of bills designed to lower the cost of prescription drugs and give American consumers access to the competitive global drug market.
On Tuesday, Sanders will introduce the three bills ahead of a hearing in a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions subcommittee that Sanders also chairs. One bill is designed to index the price of popular drugs according the global market. A second will give Medicare the opportunity to pay for drugs through a competitive bidding process, and the third would allow Americans to buy drugs at cheaper prices from foreign sellers. The policy proposals are very similar to ones Sanders has previously championed as a senator and as a Democratic Presidential candidate.
"In my view, the pharmaceutical industry is out of control," Sanders said in an interview with CNN. "They can charge any price they want at any time and that has to change."
From his perch as Budget Committee chairman, Sanders wields a powerful weapon. He is able to push through legislation through the reconciliation process, which allows bills, which directly impact the federal budget, to pass the Senate with a simple majority, as opposed to standard pieces of legislation that must overcome a 60-vote threshold to avoid a filibuster to move forward.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/22/politics/bernie-sanders-prescription-drugs-reconciliation/index.html
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last year and named in honor of their late, great colleague.
It's been gathering dust in McConnell's office, and we're going to get it reconciled with the senate version and then passed into law this time. We plan to pass a giant infrastructure bill using the reconciliation process again, and stuff a bunch of other important things in it.
Changes will be made before it becomes law, hopefully we're now in position to even strengthen some provisions, but these are excerpts from Speaker Pelosi's statement on the Elijah Cummings Lower Drug Costs Now Act:
* Gives Medicare the power to negotiate directly with the drug companies, and creates strong new tools to force drug companies to the table to agree to real price reductions, while ensuring seniors never lose access to the prescriptions they need.
* Makes the lower drug prices negotiated by Medicare available to Americans with private insurance, not just Medicare beneficiaries.
* Stops drug companies ripping off Americans while charging other countries less for the same drugs, limiting the maximum price for any negotiated drug to the average price in countries like ours, where drug companies charge less for the same drugs – and admit they still make a profit.
* Creates a new, $2,000 out-of-pocket limit on prescription drug costs for Medicare beneficiaries, and reverses years of unfair price hikes above inflation across thousands of drugs in Medicare.
* Reinvests in innovation and the search for new cures and treatments, using some of the savings from lowering the unjustified drug prices that are bankrolling Big Pharma’s stock-buybacks to reinvest billions of dollars in the search for new breakthrough treatments and cures at the National Institutes of Health.
