President Joe Biden thinks his administration’s actions to reduce the price of prescription drugs represent some of his biggest achievements in office.
He is about to call for doing even more.
During Thursday night’s State of the Union address, Biden will propose strengthening the federal government’s ability to negotiate down the prices of drugs in Medicare, according to senior White House officials. He will also call for extending a $2,000 limit on out-of-pocket drug expenses, the officials said, so that it applies to all Americans with insurance and not just those in Medicare.
Both of these changes would represent expansions of federal action on health care that became law just two years ago, as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, the sweeping climate and health care bill that Democrats passed on party-line votes.
Several provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act sought to reduce the price of prescription drugs, especially for senior citizens. The best-known and most heavily debated of these gave the federal government power to negotiate prices of certain drugs directly with manufacturers.
This is the way the governments of other economically advanced countries have long handled drug prices, and why, not coincidentally, their residents pay far less for name-brand prescription drugs than their American counterparts do.
Getting the proposal through Congress was difficult. In order to win over skeptical Democrats like outgoing Arizona Sen. Krysten Sinema, who is now an independent, Biden and his allies had to scale back the proposal significantly ― by, among other things, limiting the number of drugs subject to negotiation to 20 each year.
Biden last year indicated he wanted to include more drugs. On Thursday night, he will specify that each year’s negotiations should include “at least 50 drugs,” according to the White House officials.
Another feature of the Inflation Reduction Act introduced the first-ever limit on out-of-pocket drug spending in…
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