Biden’s Big Announcement This Week Could Change The Election

A big announcement widely expected to come on Thursday should tell us a lot about one of the Biden administration’s most important policy achievements: a , vice president for policy at the health care research organization KFF, told HuffPost.

Neuman also called the negotiated prices “an important milestone for Medicare and seniors.”

Although negotiations cover only 10 drugs this year, the number expands over time, meaning that an ever larger collection of drugs will be subject to negotiation. Expensive new weight-loss drugs are likely to fall into that category soon.

Both Biden and Harris have called for expanding the power further to apply to even more drugs and to find ways of extending negotiating power beyond Medicare.

Whether all of this would represent a benefit or loss for American society as a whole is a separate question.

Roughly one in four older Americans struggle with drug costs, according to KFF polling, with those in fair or poor health even more likely to report difficulties. That situation is a big reason liberals have pushed so hard for the U.S. to adopt the sort of negotiation practices common in other countries.

But conservatives have long argued that “negotiating” drug prices is really just a nicer way of saying “setting” drug prices, and that reducing pharmaceutical company revenue will reduce innovation by making it harder for those companies to attract investors.

Plenty of mainstream analysts think the relationship between revenue and innovation is real, although, even among them, there’s disagreement over whether the specific kinds of changes in the Inflation Reduction Act could hinder the development of meaningful treatments.

“We simply cannot ever know what drugs we may have had in the absence of the IRA price setting,” Ian Spatz, an adviser at Manatt Health who worked previously for pharmaceutical company Merck and is now an adjunct instructor at the University of Southern California, told HuffPost.

But if the policy debate is complex and muddled, the political battle lines are clear.

Republicans, along with some more conservative Democrats, have long opposed giving the federal government more leverage over prices. Project 2025, the governing manifesto from the right-wing Heritage Foundation, calls explicitly for repealing the new negotiating power and other elements of the Inflation Reduction Act. The document’s authors include multiple current and former Donald Trump aides.

Trump, who has said he knows nothing about the document, previously signed some executive orders designed to lower drug prices while he was president. He also has a history of criticizing the pharmaceutical industry and bemoaning the high prices Americans pay relative to Europeans, and during the 2016 presidential campaign he promised to “negotiate like crazy” with manufacturers.

However, when House Democrats passed a bill similar to what became the Inflation Reduction Act, Trump attacked it and backed Republican leaders in charge of the Senate when they refused to take up legislation.

Harris is sure to point out Trump’s record in the coming months as proof that Americans can count on her and her party to deliver on lower drug prices. But that argument will resonate a lot more if voters see and understand the changes already underway.