If Vice President Kamala Harris has her way, cancer and chronic disease patients will have to wait decades for their cures — if they come at all — and seniors’ health care will be less affordable than ever before.
In 2023, biopharmaceutical company Seagen ended a promising clinical trial for a potentially life-saving cancer treatment because of federal drug pricing controls in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).
This drug isn’t the first, and will not be the last, to disappear because of heavy-handed government interference.
Behind each of these drugs is a patient and family whose hope for a second chance at life has been eliminated.
As a health care professional, who maintains his license to this day, I have a duty to protect my constituents’ health.
“Do no harm” doesn’t disappear the second I swap my white coat for a navy blazer.
The Biden-Harris administration isn’t just causing harm to patients; it’s bragging about it. In his disastrous debate with former President Donald Trump, President Joe Biden claimed to have “beat Medicare.”
Unless he’s referring to beating the economic viability of innovative cures out of our health care system, he is sorely mistaken.
The IRA allows bureaucrats to mandate prices of drugs covered by Medicare. Since this bill was signed into law, 21 drugs and 36 research programs have been discontinued, and more are expected.
Independent estimates have found the drug price controls could result in as many as 139 fewer drugs coming to market. Even the non-partisan and independent Congressional Budget Office stated that the IRA is an innovation killer, eliminating treatments and cures that would’ve otherwise been developed.
Government price controls not only destroy innovation for new drugs and treatments, but also make it harder for patients to access existing medicines.
Because the IRA did not address the root cause of high prescription drug prices, the middlemen who are responsible for making your medicine expensive and inaccessible, pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), are continuing and expanding predatory practices.
PBMs are the middlemen between drug manufacturers, insurers, and pharmacies. While they claim to lower drug costs by negotiating rebates on behalf of patients, the spread is pocketed by the PBMs themselves, so patients never see a dime.
On top of this, PBMs create roadblocks that decrease patients’ access to medically necessary care.
Common barriers to care that PBMs artificially put in patients’ way include prior authorizations and fail first step therapy. Prior authorization refers to a health insurance plan requiring prior approval for a medication, procedure, or treatment to be covered, even if it’s been prescribed by a physician.
This process is tedious, can lead to lengthy delays, and often results in a paper-pusher who does not know the patient deciding whether they get the care that they need.
Fail first step therapy refers to a common insurance requirement that patients try and fail on a treatment before it will cover the one prescribed by the doctor.
Each of these barriers delay needed tests and treatments, leading to worse outcomes for patients and higher medical costs.
Since the IRA’s enactment, 89 percent of plans have said they will increase the use of tactics like prior authorizations and fail first step therapy.
In other words, despite the federal government artificially setting prescription drug prices, patients will still face higher costs because the incentives for PBMs to steer patients toward higher-cost drugs and restrict access to cheaper alternatives still exist.
This isn’t just impacting the cost of prescriptions; it’s impacting the price of health insurance, too.
Two years since the IRA was signed into law, Medicare Part D premiums have skyrocketed. Last year, premiums increased 21 percent.
Republicans in Congress have been warning that premiums will significantly increase next year thanks to this haphazardly-written legislation. In fact, 2025 bids for standalone Part D plans skyrocketed 179 percent.
The Inflation Reduction Act also means that seniors also have fewer Medicare Part D plans from which to choose. In 2006, seniors had access to 1,429 Medicare Part D plans.
To no one’s surprise, the number of standalone Medicare Part D plans available for seniors dropped by 11 percent from last year — the fewest standalone Part D plans since the program was created.
Seniors are struggling to pay for health insurance, and instead of giving them hope, the Biden-Harris administration is giving them hell.
To add insult to injury, Washington Democrats used the rebate pass-through rule, which would have lowered drug costs at the pharmacy counter, to pay for the IRA.
Rather than allowing patients to get discounts at the pharmacy counter, Washington Democrats diverted that money to unrelated liberal priorities.
At a time when Medicare is set to become insolvent in 6 years, the Biden-Harris administration raided roughly $280 billion in savings from the bill’s Medicare prescription drug provisions to push its big-government agenda.
If Harris truly cared about lowering drug costs and improving our health care system, she should be advocating for bipartisan solutions, like the bipartisan Lower Costs, More Transparency Act This bill will increase health care transparency, ban predatory drug pricing tactics in Medicaid, and correcting misaligned incentives so that PBMs are forced to pass their savings off to patients.
As vice president, Harris has a duty to support patients and seniors. Instead, she chose to steal from them the way that PBMs have been for decades.
