Key Points
- President Joe Biden said the federal Medicare program should negotiate prices for at least 50 prescription drugs each year, up from the current target of 20 medicines.
- That proposal is one of several new health-care policy plans Biden will outline during his State of the Union address Thursday.
- But the fate of his new proposals will be in the hands of a divided Congress, making it highly uncertain whether they will pass into law.
50??? How about 100….percent?
This is great news. And for everyone asking for “100%”, that’s not how politics works. Politics is “the art of the possible” not a magic wand that can make anything happen.
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
He wasn’t talking about percentages though.
Edit: I agree that more should be regulated, but you need to start with the critical ones first. It’s easier to negotiate from that standpoint and build up.
Yea, but instead of fifty drugs we should negotiate on all if them.
There is no reason other than corporate greed to not negotiate drug prices.
Well, if you start with the 50 most used/highest line items on the budget… a lot of savings can be had.
Honestly, I am always wondering why there is a negotiation at all. If Wal-Mart can get the away with telling the likes of Sony, Nestle, and Kraft how much THEY will be paying for the stock for their shelves, the fucking government can do it with abandon. Fuck these asshats. Like, who are they going to complain to besides their hand puppets in Congress and on the supreme court? The government should not be required to participate in the free market, especially if so many fuckwidgets want to tell them that they are not allowed to regulate it.
Or we could just readdress healthcare since in 2008 we got a more conservative version of the Republican’s plan and then promptly forgot about ever improving it
We need actual progressives to get shit done, Biden and other “moderates” just won’t even try, and want us to be happy for crumbs.
Biden could be spontaneously replaced with Mao Zedong and that still wouldn’t suddenly make a Congress with a Republican House start passing laws.
Healthcare reform is passed by Congress, not the president. So first you need 50, or better yet 60, Senators who are interested in getting it done.
So first you need 50
We had that. They squandered it.
No, we never had 50 who would kill the filibuster
From 2007 to 2011 Democrats controlled both the house and the senate. Obama was president from 2008-2012.
Democrats squandered it.
Democrats only had a Senate supermajority for 72 days.
Furthermore, a supermajority of exactly 60 votes only allows Democrats to pass something that 100% of them support. And Lieberman did not support anything more far reaching than the ACA, such as a public option.
Don’t let facts ruin their narrative.
What’s your narrative? Democrats had control of both the Senate and the house with a Democrat president for years and somehow it’s still Republicans fault they did basically fuck all with it?
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Doesn’t change the fact. Democrats had control of both the Senate and the house. They squandered it.
On the contrary, they squeezed everything they could out of that majority.
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… And a majority in the House.
They had that. They squandered it.
They had that? When did we have a progressive president for 2 terms, a Congress and a Senate that was all progressive. It hasn’t happened in my life
Democrats had a majority in the Senate and the house for four years. If you’re acknowledging that establishment Democrats are corrupt pieces of shit then I agree with you but it seems like you’re trying to avoid acknowledging that fact.
I am not an American so there’s parts of this I don’t get. My national health agency negotiates prices for all drugs, thousands of them so this reads weird to ke.
Article says even these measures are uncertain to become law, does that mean it would be even less likely if something more ambitious was planned?
Medicare negotiating prices is a fairly new thing for the US and something that could ultimately be killed by the supreme court (it shouldn’t be, but we have a majority of extremists on the court).
Why it’s uncertain to become law is because our right wing party (republicans) have historically been completely opposed to any social program. Our “left” party is also fairly centrist and arguably even right leaning in parts so it’s uncertain that even with a majority of them in power that improvements would pass.
The problem we have is the filibuster in the senate. It allows any senator to kill a bill. To overturn it takes 60 votes (out of 100) and the senate is currently split 50/50.
The meager changes we got under obamacare literally happened because a republican senator died which opened the gate to ram through a few pieces of legislation which would otherwise not pass. Obamacare was overall an OK bill with some good stuff in it, but it really just re-enforced the current crazy capitalist market system. That was all the right leaning democrats would stomach. There was talk about an option for using government healthcare but that was quashed.
I know all political systems have their problems and limitations, gotta say that sucks especially the part about one man blocking new laws and also having extremists running a court? That’s literally the opposite of what a court should be in my opinion.
I guess that would make it really hard for anyone, even a president, to put meaningful changes in place.
Over here we have a competent leader totally bogged down and derailed by their party extremists. He could be good, but the system itself means he’s really not. Sounds like America has a version of that too.
I assumed you were talking about the UK until you said competent leader.
At least you don’t have an unelected, actively malicious kleptocrat in charge, emboldened by the extremists like we do in good ol’ blighty right now.
I guess that would make it really hard for anyone, even a president, to put meaningful changes in place.
Yup. We can pass legislation that says “hey SC, you are wrong about the interpretation of this legislation so do it right”. However, they’ve invented this “major questions doctrine” principle that basically lets them strike down “big” things that they don’t like.
The only solution to that problem is either justices dying or legislation being passed to raise the cap on justices and the president packing the court. Which runs right into the filibuster problem.
At the beginning of biden’s term democrats nearly nuked the filibuster. However, 2 centrist democrats squashed that.
“Actual progressives” can’t get shit done because they can’t get elected.
Sometimes they get elected, but the system is so filled with corruption that it seems those progressive values are quickly abandoned. Justice Dems are, sadly, often good examples of this.
We have to end the legalized bribery and get money out of politics before any true progressive agenda can be implemented.
“Actual progressives” can’t get shit done because they can’t get elected.
But then the people who won’t vote for progressives browbeat progressives into voting for their pro-corporate trash candidates. Or scream and cry when their pro-corporate trash candidate loses in the general.
Sounds good. Letsdoit!
Really feels like it should be based on % difference from average costs paid by other industrialized nations. I have no frame of reference for whether drugs 21-50 are high margin enough to merit the costs of hiring people to research and negotiate. I assume they are but then like why not 51? Why not 3000? Why not 15? I can’t follow the logic if we’re just saying numbers of drugs.
Health’care’ is such bullshit it’s infuriating. Wife and me, early to mid 30s, non smokers, no meds no pre existing conditions… $800 a month and it doesn’t pay for shit except for catastrophic.
Meanwhile, these insurance companies are some of the most profitable companies on the planet.
There should be a middle ground… maybe charge me $200 a month and still reap enormous profits. Not like I can ever charge them for anything unless my arm gets chopped off. Even if I lost an arm, something tells me they have the ‘bulk purchasing power’ to have an injury like that not cost much.
Hear me out. You shouldn’t have to pay anything, those companies shouldn’t exist and it should be government funded. - sincerely the rest of the western world
But the only way to pay for this would be through taxes, and taxes are theft remember.
Oh I completely agree… I sadly just don’t expect that to happen in the good ol land of the free.
The least they could do is completely screw us all at a rate of about one quarter of the current rates. That way I could at least forget about the complete absurdity of the whole situation for 5 seconds.
Better than it is, far from goal…
How about making it available to younger people?
