While President Joe Biden is using Medicare to lower the cost of a handful of overpriced drugs and wants to expand the practice to hundreds more, some of Big Pharma’s favorite Democrats are working to do the opposite.
After the pharmaceutical industry unleashed a $1.5 million bipartisan donation blitz, members of Biden’s own party have joined with Republican lawmakers to try to limit the number of drugs regulators can cut prices for in the future — an initiative Donald Trump is actively campaigning on in the lead-up to the 2024 presidential elections.
Democratic Reps. Scott Peters (Calif.), Wiley Nickel (N.C.), Josh Gottheimer (N.J.) and Donald Davis (N.C.) are each co-sponsoring at least one of several proposed bills that would limit regulators’ ability to negotiate down prices of drugs covered by the Medicare government insurance program. The legislation would erode the drug-pricing reforms included in the Democrats’ 2022 Inflation Reduction Act — efforts that Peters and Gottheimer supported. (Davis and Nickel had not yet been elected to Congress.)
