A 30-Year Campaign to Control Drug Prices Faces Yet Another Failure

[bluewater]

Democrats have made giving government the power to negotiate drug prices a central campaign theme for decades. With the power to make it happen, they may fall short yet again.

When a powerful Democratic Senate chairman assembled his Special Committee on Aging to confront what he called a “crisis of affordability” for prescription drugs, he proposed a novel solution: allow the government to negotiate better deals for critical medications.

The year was 1989, and the idea from that chairman, former Senator David Pryor of Arkansas, touched off a drive for government drug-price negotiations that has been embraced by two generations of Democrats and one Republican president, Donald J. Trump — but now appears at risk of being left out of a sprawling domestic policy bill taking shape in Congress.

Senior Democrats insist that they have not given up the push to grant Medicare broad powers to negotiate lower drug prices as part of a once-ambitious climate change and social safety net bill that is slowly shrinking in scope. They know that the loss of the provision, promoted by President Biden on the campaign trail and in the White House, could be a particularly embarrassing defeat for the package, since it has been central to Democratic congressional campaigns for nearly three decades.

“Senate Democrats understand that after all the pledges, you’ve got to deliver,” said Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the chairman of the Finance Committee.

“It’s not dead,” declared Representative Richard E. Neal of Massachusetts, the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee.

But with at least three House Democrats opposing the toughest version of the measure, and at least one Senate Democrat, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, against it, government negotiating power appears almost certain to be curtailed, if not jettisoned. The loss would be akin to Republicans’ failure under Mr. Trump to repeal the Affordable Care Act, after solemn pledges for eight years to dismantle the health law “root and branch.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/21/us/politics/drug-prices-democrats.html?smid=tw-share

I wish the media would stop referring to people like those three House Democrats and Senator Sinema as "moderates".

As a dyed-in-the-wool progressive, I find calling anyone opposing this core Democratic position a "moderate" to be an insult to actual moderate Democrats.

[Celerity]

1. "The idea of the moderate middle is bullshit: it's a rhetorical device meant to marginalize some

policy positions at the expense of others.”

https://www.vox.com/2014/7/8/5878293/lets-stop-using-the-word-moderate


from the article in this OP

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100215964490

[Hugh_Lebowski]

2. Trump didn't support what Dems do ... he wanted to be able to order some lower prices himself

So he could take the credit and have people say nice things about him.

I don't ever remember his saying he wanted Medicare administrators to have price negotiation rights. Could be I forget, but ...

It was almost certainly also a shakedown for donations to his campaign from Big Pharma.

[halfulglas]

3. Isn't it embarrassing that "moderates" are against Medicare negotiating drug prices

Since they keep emphasizing the price of the bill. Negotiating drug pricing will save the government enormous sums of money since when Medicare can negotiate the prices and the drug prices will go down for those not on Medicare, too. I watch that slick ad that the drug companies put out about "we don't want the government to negotiate drug pricing because then the government will pick what drugs you can and can't take." Actually, they are afraid people will opt to go for the lower price drug prescribed since there will be an enormous price difference between the generic and the newest tweak of an old name brand drug to keep their profits high on advertised drugs. Right now even many generics are way overpriced because they can be without negotiations with Medicare, the largest buyer of drugs in the country.

[bullwinkle428]

4. There was a report a few weeks back where a guy specializing in policy polling

had surveyed Democratic voters on something like 194 different policy proposals, and the one involving Medicare's ability to negotiate drug prices was BY FAR the most popular of that huge collection!

Once again, it appears as if it's going get tossed overboard, and then we sit there wondering why voter turnout isn't nearly as good as it could be.

[TheBlackAdder]

5. Perhaps he's also running smoke to prevent Manchin's daughter from being investigated.

.

A little quid pro quo or something. Who knows what their true bonds are, but they seem tight.

.