President Joe Biden called on Congress to pass controversial legislation allowing Medicare to negotiate the prices of prescription drugs to offset the costs of improving Obamacare.
“Let’s give Medicare the power to save hundreds of billions of dollars by negotiating lower prescription prices,” Biden said Wednesday. “And the money you save … billions of dollars can go to strengthen [Obamacare].”
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House Democrats first passed the Elijah Cummings Lower Drug Costs Now legislation, or H.R. 3, in December 2019, but it stalled before getting a vote in the majority-GOP Senate. The sweeping drug pricing reform package would allow the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services to negotiate prescription drug prices for Medicare. The bill would also require a drug’s price to be set at or below 120% of the average price across six high-income countries — Australia, Japan, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany.
Democrats aimed to introduce the most contentious provisions of H.R. 3, such as direct drug pricing negotiations, in Biden’s American Families Plan unveiled this week and valued at about $1.8 trillion.
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Biden added that the savings from negotiating prescription drug prices would be directed toward his goal to “expand Medicare coverage benefits without costing taxpayers an additional penny.” He included a provision in the American Families Plan that would lower the eligibility age for health coverage under Medicare from 65 to 60 to help older adults who can’t afford a private insurance plan but also don’t qualify for coverage under Medicaid, the federal health program for the very poor and disabled.
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Any effort to implement parts of the House Democrats’ drug pricing bill would face opposition from the pharmaceutical industry, which has in the past railed against measures it sees as a detriment to innovation.
