President Joe Biden will outline on Thursday his “vision” for lowering prescription drug prices, but the proposal will require new legislation from Congress.
The announcement, framed as another facet of Biden’s Build Back Better agenda, is set to come during the president’s final remarks before departing Washington, D.C., for Wilmington, Delaware, according to the White House.
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One White House official told the Washington Examiner that Biden will highlight pharmaceutical companies for doing “enormous work by developing lifesaving COVID-19 vaccines,” but he still believes “crippling drug prices are unacceptable.”
“President Biden believes that health care is a right, not a privilege. No American should have to face difficult choices between paying for their prescription medications or other essential needs,” the White House elaborated in a lengthy statement Thursday morning. “Too many Americans face this exact challenge. On average, Americans pay two to three times as much as people in other countries for prescription drugs, and one in four Americans who take prescription drugs struggle to afford their medications.”
Biden is asking Congress to pass legislation allowing Medicare to “negotiate the price for a subset of expensive drugs that don’t face any competition in the market.” Furthermore, the proposal calls for outlining a “fair price” for certain drugs and providing pharmaceutical companies incentives to agree to price controls.
Democrats, led by the late Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings, passed similar legislation in 2019, but the Senate never brought it to the floor for a vote.
The president will additionally call for future reforms capping out-of-pocket costs for Medicare beneficiaries and call back to his past executive order on the subject directing local, state, and tribal officials to research and develop “generic and biosimilar drugs that give patients the same exact clinical benefit but at a fraction of the price.”
The administration said it believes Biden’s “vision” will lower premiums for “millions” of people and save the average Medicare beneficiary $200.
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Both Biden and his predecessor, former President Donald Trump, took significant action to import prescription drugs from Canada to lower costs for the public. In July, Biden signed an executive order directing the Food and Drug Administration to “work with states and tribes to safely import prescription drugs from Canada, pursuant to the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003.”
