Congress won’t address surprise billing or drug prices in year-end government funding negotiations, pushing two top healthcare agenda items related to high medical costs into a major election year.
Instead, the spending deal coming together Monday contains extensions of several expiring healthcare programs that would instead run out on May 22, setting up a must-pass mechanism for Congress to revisit the issues of surprise billing and high drug prices in 2020, according to a senior House Democratic aide familiar with talks.
Negotiations over the bill are continuing, but a spending deal must pass the House Tuesday so the Senate will have enough time to take it up ahead of Friday and avoid a shutdown.
Surprise billing and drug prices were top priorities for lawmakers and President Trump heading into 2019, but medical industry groups have slowed legislation. On the issue of surprise billing, lawmakers have been unable to agree on whether they should limit what hospitals should be allowed to charge and on the extent that they should be allowed to appeal bills to an independent arbiter.
Setting up a new deadline may increase the chance that lawmakers will come to a deal on a drug pricing bill that passed the Senate Finance Committee, which would cap what seniors pay out of pocket for their drugs and penalize pharmaceutical companies who raise their prices above inflation.
But the failure to arrive at a deal could give Democrats ammunition ahead of the 2020 elections to cast Republicans as uncommitted to lowering drug prices. House Democrats came together last week to pass a measure that would let the government negotiate down the prices of some of the most expensive prescription drugs, but it won’t be taken up in the GOP-controlled Senate.
The spending deal contains multiple other healthcare provisions, such as raising the legal age to purchase tobacco to 21 and helping generic drugs get to market faster. The package would also permanently gut taxes that were meant to pay for Obamacare, handing another win to the healthcare industry. The bill would nix taxes on health insurance, known as the health insurance tax and the “Cadillac tax,” and undo a tax on medical devices. Congress has lifted these provisions previously, after the industry argued that costs get passed onto customers.
