Drug industry poised for rare political loss on prices
"I don't know what % of a loaf it represents but we were looking at no loaf a few days ago. 15% minimum tax on corps is big, so is Medicare negotiating lower drug prices. IRS enforcement is a force multiplier."
It would be bigger and better without Manchin. It should be. Still after so long it's a breakthrough step.
Senate deal giving Medicare limited authority to negotiate prices would chip at power of Big Pharma
By Christopher Rowland July 28, 2022 at 5:21 p.m. EDT
Bottles of medicine at a mail-in pharmacy warehouse in Florence, N.J. (Julio Cortez/AP)
Year after year for most of two decades, proposals to allow the government to negotiate lower prices from drug companies for Medicare recipients have wound up dead in Congress, defeated by the powerful pharmaceutical industry and its allies. Now the Washington drug lobby is on the cusp of a rare political loss. Share with The Post: What’s one way you’ve felt the impact of inflation?
Although it is limited in scope and wouldn’t go into effect until 2026, the measure if enacted would represent a significant step away from the government’s hands-off approach to drug pricing that has stoked drug company profits while fueling popular outrage. Polling .. https://www.kff.org/health-costs/poll-finding/public-weighs-in-on-medicare-drug-negotiations/ .. has shown for years that huge majorities of Americans from both parties support Medicare negotiation of drug prices.
“Now, finally, like every other country in the world, we’ll be able to negotiate with drug companies on expensive drugs. It is a truly historic breakthrough many, many years in the making,” said David Mitchell, president and founder of Patients for Affordable Drugs, one of the advocacy groups that has been pushing Congress to act.
Seniors with high drug costs would receive significant relief from another part of the bill. By 2025, it would cap their out-of-pocket costs for Medicare Part D (the prescription drug pharmacy benefit) at $2,000. By 2024, it would eliminate a 5 percent co-pay on drugs for catastrophic coverage, saving thousands of dollars for patients with serious diseases like cancer who require very expensive drugs. Those are not the controversial parts.
The industry fight over pricing is what has attracted the most heat. Drug companies have lobbied heavily to avoid anything that resembles government price controls for its products. They are on pace to break records in 2022 with $187 million in lobbying activity reported so far, with an army of 1,587 registered lobbyists (57 percent of them former government officials), according to Open Secrets .. https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/industries/summary?cycle=2022&id=H04 , a nonprofit group that tracks political spending.
The industry argues that price caps, negotiating or other government curbs on profits will sap the industry’s will to pursue new innovations. But the Congressional Budget Office, an official scorekeeper for the impacts of legislation, said the impact on industry innovation would be modest: a reduction of 15 drugs .. https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2022-07/senSubtitle1_Finance.pdf .. coming to market out of an expected 1,300 over 30 years, based on the limited scope of negotiations being proposed.
That has not stopped the industry from stepping up dire warnings.
“This bill will decimate the hope of curing cancer and other deadly diseases,” Stephen Ubl, president and chief executive officer of PhRMA, the industry’s largest lobbying group, said at a forum .. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ee0Xj6jLhbk&t=749s .. on Wednesday. Faced with dwindling returns, drug companies would lack incentives to seek new uses for approved drugs, Ubl said. He added that “negotiating” is a misnomer in the bill, because the “deck is stacked” in the government’s favor with a proposed tax on the sale of medicine if manufacturers refused the government’s price. Michelle McMurry-Heath, president and chief executive of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, said in a news release this month the legislation “could propel us light-years back into the dark ages of biomedical research.”
The industry received a public relations boost during the coronavirus pandemic when Pfizer and Moderna rolled out effective vaccines, using novel technology discovered in government-funded research .. https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/forefront.20210512.191448/ , in record time.
“I’m not sure that we would be here if industry hadn’t fought more modest reform bills as hard as they have,” said Rachel Sachs, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis and nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies the drug industry.
Still, the Senate’s Medicare pricing has major limitations. Negotiated prices will only apply to a narrow category of expensive drugs with no generic competition, and then only in relatively small numbers.
Moreover, negotiated prices would not be permitted until nine to 13 years after a new drug’s introduction, so the launch price of new drugs will remain unfettered. After launch, drug companies would face financial penalties if they continue to raise prices faster than the rate of inflation. Drug companies an incentive to capture as much profit as possible in those initial years.
“It is clear that if this legislation passes it will lead to higher drug prices at the time drugs are first launched on the market,” the investment firm Raymond James wrote this month in an analysis.
Another point of contention: Insulin .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/03/03/cheaper-insulin-plan/?itid=lk_inline_manual_31 .. would not be covered under the negotiation provisions, because the drugs will have generic competition. Also left out is a $35 proposed cap on the co-pay for consumer purchases of insulin. Groups including Public Citizen continued this week to press the Senate to restore the insulin provisions, which were included in earlier versions.
Public Citizen is among those who have pressed Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) to restore the insulin provision in the reconciliation bill, which will not require 60 votes to pass. Excessive insulin pricing is causing a “rationing crisis that has killed a number of people in the United States and is a needless cause of suffering, since we’re talking about a 100-year-old medical technology,” Maybarduk said.
Chris Rowland joined The Washington Post business team in 2018 after serving as the Washington bureau chief for the Boston Globe, leading coverage of two presidential elections and overseeing political enterprise reporting. He previously covered health care for the Globe in Boston. Twitter
It's a fraud munchkin and the rich are foisting on citizens. It's actually cutting the rich and big business taxes by a large percent. What they're bragging about is that many countries are on the bandstand, but only a few major corps will pay more in taxes, like fb who pay less than 13 percent around the world, will only go up less than 2%
It's bullshit. And Biden knows it but can't get rid of munchkin yet. The total bill was reduced 75% by republiklans and munchkin and munchkin tore out large amounts of regulations that would have costed his donors money and the amounts spread out over 10 years are lame. Again it's the hidden things munchkin locked out of 'his' bill.
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