The Biden administration released its list of 10 prescription medicines that will be subject to the first-ever price negotiations by the U.S. Medicare health program that covers 66 million people, with big-selling blood thinner Eliquis from Bristol Myers Squibb and Pfizer among them.
Great for the over-65s. How about being able to negotiate drug prices for everyone else? Oh right, I forgot. That’s evil socialism.
Gotta keep em alive so they can vote for this to be reversed once the Republicans are able to
Absolutely agree, and this will be more helpful to over 65s than others. I’m personally in favor of a single payer system. However there may still be some benefit to others not on medicare. This may give private insurers more leverage in bargaining lower prices for them too in their own negotiations with drug companies. They were always allowed to bargain of course but have less power than Medicare due to their small sizes. Even with this though if it’s anything like other services private insurance pays for, they’re probably going to still be paying out something like 1.5-2 times the Medicare rates, but since the Medicare cost will be lower the costs others are negotiating will probably lower some too.
The massive private insurance conglomerates all are owned by the same people as the pharma conglomerates. They already get massive discount rates and are basically self dealing anyway.
The whole house of cards is to extract maximum profits from public healthcare funds.
Basically nobody pays the list price other than Medicaid/Medicare or people with no coverage at all.
Oh absolutely, agreed on all points. I was just saying there’s a possibility others beyond Medicare recipients might see some improvement in prices on these drugs as a result of this, but it doesn’t address the many many root problems with our current system like you say. Americans are still going to be massively overpaying on drugs. At least one small step in the right direction though, Medicare paying less for drugs benefits us all indirectly too some since everyone is paying into that with taxes.
So true, even a baby step is better than the o motion or even backpedalling from the last 30 years.
This could be the thin edge of the wedge that opens things up. Even countries with pharmacare don’t negotiate all drugs, they have an approved list. Once the list exists, we can gradually expand it. So this is a huge change.
I think it’s good to always fight for more, but I think it’s self sabotaging when even wins like this are treated as failures.