All I can say is: Everyone who blocks reasonable drug prices needs to experience the need for them, after their insurance has been canceled.
That's not nearly enough. I guess my previous rant hasn't quite finished. [RESUME PREVIOUS RANT]
In December 2003, George W Bush signed the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003 into law. At the time, it was touted as a major improvement in how Medicare would pay for prescription drugs. Policymakers concluded that participation in the new program should be voluntary, with Medicare beneficiaries and taxpayers sharing the costs. However, they ignored lessons from the past about the need to match expanded benefits with adequate mechanisms for cost containment.
How pharmaceutical manufacturers helped shape the Medicare drug benefit was, in part, a calculated decision by a lucrative industry to throw its financial weight behind one political party -- with $50 million in campaign contributions over the previous four years – the vast majority to Republicans. In a mostly unseen campaign, a small army of lobbyists in Washington and a network of industry-financed groups carried the drug makers' message to the public.
The industry had a single goal: to defeat any legislation that would let Medicare negotiate steep discounts on the prices of medicines for its 40 million beneficiaries. The big pharma industry executives wanted a prescription drug benefit, that would be administered by the private sector, where insurance companies would negotiate on their own, without Medicare's influence. After Bush signed it into law, taxpayers would spend some $400 billion over the next 10 years on the drug makers' products, while banning government officials from even seeking volume discounts.
"The drug lobby has just emasculated Congress with tons of money," said Representative Pete Stark of California, the senior Democrat on the health subcommittee of the House Ways and Means Committee, whose GOP leaders wrote the House Medicare bill. ''They bought themselves a deal.'' Those GOP committee members who actually wrote the bill only copied language provided to them by the Big Pharma lobbyists. Several of those congressman were later rewarded with high paying jobs in Big Pharma.
Republicans claimed that their legislation would lead to discounts in the future, but it never did.
More recently, in March 2024, Biden signed into law the Inflation Reduction Act which included a partial repeal of some of the worst features of Bush's 2003 act. But it only partially addresses the extremely high prescription drug costs. Big Pharma fought it all the way.
