With Tuesday night’s victories in the House of Representatives, Democrats are set to make a run at a long-held goal of giving Medicare the authority to negotiate lower drug prices when they assume control.
House Democrats have been infuriated that President Trump has done nothing to endorse the proposal even after touting it throughout the 2016 campaign. Trump’s administration has sought to install price controls for certain Medicare drugs, but it has stopped short of giving Medicare, and not private plans, the power to negotiate lower prices.
“We want to give President Trump what he said he wanted in the campaign: the bill that I have been working on that would give him the bidding authority that he said would save so much money,” Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas, told the Washington Examiner in September.
Democrats are also expected to launch a plethora of probes into the Trump administration.
Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., who will likely be the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, said that his goal is to “conduct independent, fact-based, and credible investigations.”
He told the Washington Examiner in a statement that “access to affordable and quality healthcare is one of my most critical priorities.”
Cummings said that Democrats could examine why Trump “went back on his campaign promise” to endorse Medicare negotiating power.
Cummings has been particularly irked by Trump’s position change on Medicare negotiating power.
After meeting with Trump in the Oval Office in March 2017 to discuss drug prices, Cummings said that the president seemed encouraged about the lawmakers’ bill to give Medicare negotiating power. But since that meeting, Cummings charged, the White House has ignored several overtures to work on the Medicare negotiating legislation.
Cummings and Rep. Peter Welch, D-Vt., who was also at the meeting, eventually introduced their own Medicare negotiating bill, which went nowhere in the GOP-controlled Congress.
It remains highly unlikely that a bill giving Medicare negotiating power could make it to Trump’s desk, as it would require 60 votes in the Senate.
Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar has also called giving Medicare negotiating power a “gimmick.” However, Azar has embraced giving Medicare more negotiating power, albeit in the hands of private vendors and not the government itself.
Currently Medicare pays for drugs under two programs: Medicare Part B and Part D.
Part B drugs are products that are administered by a physician or in a hospital setting, such as vaccines. The agency reimburses doctors or hospitals for administering the drugs and also pays a small markup for handling costs.
Medicare Part D is the program that seniors use to buy drugs from a pharmacies. Under Part D, private plans negotiate discounted rates from drugmakers.
A drug-pricing blueprint the administration released in May aims to shift drugs covered in Part B onto Part D so that private plans could negotiate for lower prices.
A few weeks ago, the administration made a proposal to tie the prices it pays for Part B drugs to the prices that wealthy countries overseas pay. The administration wants to lower the price it pays for drugs compared to wealthy countries like Japan or Germany.
European countries use single-payer, government-run healthcare systems to negotiate for lower prices from drugmakers.
Democrats, who have increasingly embraced such a system for the U.S., want to now install that same power for Medicare instead of private plans.
