Current Events > "Do Democrats actually want to lower drug prices?"

(+) Yeah! (+)

https://newrepublic.com/article/154038/democrats-actually-want-make-drugs-cheaper

... Like many seemingly intractable problems in American society, the problem of out-of-control drug prices is only complex and difficult to solve because the easy solutions are forestalled by our plutocrat-captured political system. The government could institute price controls, as basically every other country does. Thats a solution so obvious that even the Trump administrationwhich occasionally gestures at doing popular things for political gain before the conservative ideologues in charge of actually administrating the government step in to ensure that the looting continuesabruptly endorsed a version of that idea just before last years midterms. Trump health officials, acting for a brief moment in something that might be plausibly described as the actual public interest, proposed outsourcing the price-setting process (for drugs covered by Medicare Part B) to various other countries that figured out how to do this many years ago.

An even more effective remedy, considering that the government already funds billions of dollars worth of drug research that pharmaceutical companies eventually profit from, would just be to nationalize the pharmaceutical industry, or at least eliminate its patent monopoly.

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Luckily, bold, consumer-focused solutions to Americas kitchen table issues are exactly the sort of things the Democratic Party would like to be identified with, in the eyes of the electorate. And so, taking a break from squabbling about impeachment and oversight with members of her own caucus, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi last month pointed fractious House Democrats toward a planthe result of private talks with the Trump administration, say the Huffington Posts Zach Carter and Daniel Maransto pass a bill about high drug prices.

Mind you, this was not a plan actually to lower the costs of drugs. No, it was a plan to pass a bill about high drug prices. Here, per Carter and Marans, is how it would work:

Capitol Hill sources tell HuffPost that the prescription drug proposal, which has not been officially released to the public, would empower the secretary of health and human services to negotiate lower prices with pharmaceutical companies for drugs sold in the U.S. If the two parties failed to reach an agreement on an individual medication, the Government Accountability Office would be permitted to set a final price close to the typical amount charged for the drug in other countries.

The Department of Health and Human Services would be required to negotiate on at least 25 drugs each year, and companies that refused to participate would be slapped with a tax equal to 50 percent of their prior years sales of the drug. Prices on all drugs covered under Medicare Parts B and D could not be increased going forward, and any company that still did so would have 100% of the price hike taxed away.

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The basic, blinding flaw in this proposal is to task Donald Trumps health and human services secretary, a former pharmaceutical industry executive and lobbyist, with deciding, at his personal discretion, to negotiate the prices of at least 25 drugs. But even without that bit of biographical detail, you can already figure out the various ways that a price intervention all but designed to function as anything but a serious curb on drug pricing cant possibly work, right?

For one thing, Americas unique dilemma in need of remedy is drug costs, not 25 drugs costs. The JAMA Network Open study focused on 49 drugs that involved more than 100,000 pharmacy claims.

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What is the tl;dr
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Squall28 posted...

What is the tl;dr

"Maybe"
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Squall28 posted...

What is the tl;dr

Democrats' bill to lower drug prices just seems to empower the pharmaceutical lobbyist who currently runs HHS.
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we should institute price controls on prescription drugs, but the author is overstating how meaningful this would be in practice. other countries have found their mechanisms insufficient:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4193451/

France, Germany, Sweden, and the United Kingdom each use different types of policies for controlling prescription drug spending. Until recent years, these policies have relied heavily on regulating prices charged by drug manufacturers, with different systems providing varying degrees of pricing freedom. While these policies appear to have brought some degree of price restraint, they have not prevented continued growth in prescription drug spending. As a result, each country is supplementing its policies with measures aimed at physicians and consumers and targeted at reducing a perceived over-utilization of pharmaceutical products.
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*am a democrat*
Yes.
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