Rachel Cohrs December 05, 2019 06:21
PM
House Democratic leaders on Thursday announced
plans to use savings from their government drug price negotiation bill to
expand Medicare benefits, increase financial assistance for low-income
beneficiaries, fund community health centers, bolster research at the National
Institutes of Health, combat drug shortages and fund other healthcare
priorities. They said the bill will come up for a House floor vote the week of
Dec. 9.
House Energy & Commerce Committee Chair
Frank Pallone (D-N.J.), Ways & Means Chair Richard Neal (D-Mass.), and
Education & Labor Chair Bobby Scott (D-Va.) said they expect the Elijah E.
Cummings Lower Drug Costs Now Act to save around $500 billion over the next 10
years, according to guidance they received from the Congressional Budget
Office. The leaders did not provide any further details about the CBO analysis.
The House bill would allocate savings from
drug-pricing provisions to add vision, dental and hearing coverage to Medicare
Part B. The expansion would provide coverage for dental procedures, dentures,
eye exams, glasses, contact lenses and hearing aids in traditional Medicare.
The expansions have long been a priority for
beneficiary advocates.
"The lack of coverage for these important
health benefits leads to worse health outcomes for older Americans and could
actually cause higher Medicare spending," said AARP National Volunteer
President Catherine Alicia Georges at a Ways & Means Committee hearing on
the drug-pricing bill in October.
Lawmakers also said bill savings would be used
to expand eligibility for low-income subsidies in Medicare and financial
assistance with out-of-pocket expenses. Community health centers would receive
$10 billion of funding for capital improvements and capacity building. Money would
also be allocated to invest in home visits to reduce maternal mortality and
boost local government treatment programs to fight the opioid epidemic.
Additional savings would be directed to funding
biomedical research at the National Institutes of Health and to supporting the
Food and Drug Administration's efforts to mitigate drug shortages and modernize
infrastructure.
Congressional Progressive Caucus Co-Chair
Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) has said she has concerns that taxpayer-funded
research at the NIH is being used to develop drugs that everyday Americans
cannot afford.
"I would like to see money go into
(research and development), but there have to be some very specific
protections," Jayapal said on Nov. 21. "If we are the investor, then
the American people should get the benefit of that investment."
Even if the Lower Drug Costs Now Act passes in
the House, its prospects are grim in the upper chamber. Senate Majority Leader
Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has said that the House bill will not come up for a vote
in the Senate.
The House drug-pricing package would allow the
HHS Secretary to negotiate with drug companies on the prices of a limited
number of high-priced drugs with little competition. The negotiations would be
bounded by an international index of drug prices in several developed
countries. If drugmakers did not agree to a negotiated price, they would be
taxed up to 95% of their sales.
The bill would also redesign Medicare's Part D
benefit and limit seniors' spending on drugs dispensed at the pharmacy counter
to $2,000 per year. Drugmakers would have to pay back the government if they
raise drug prices faster than inflation.
President Donald Trump took to Twitter to deride
the legislation.
"Pelosi and her Do Nothing Democrats drug
pricing bill doesn't do the trick. FEWER cures! FEWER treatments! Time for the
Democrats to get serious about bipartisan solutions to lowering prescription
drug prices for families," Trump tweeted on Nov. 22.
The White House Council of Economic Advisers on
Tuesday published a blog post decrying the bill's potential negative impact on
drug development. The report extrapolated a preliminary CBO score on one
provision of the Lowering Drug Costs Now Act to conclude that the bill could
result in a worst-case scenario of as many as 100 fewer drugs entering the
market over a decade due to reduced revenue for the pharmaceutical industry.
However, policy analysts and stakeholders who
support the bill dismissed the analysis. Experts argued that reductions in
revenue do not necessitate reductions in research funding; that not all new
drugs are necessarily innovative; and that drug-pricing policies promoted by
the Trump administration would also reduce drugmakers' revenue.
"The biggest math bogey is the impact
estimate based on assumption that all of R&D expenses go into developing
new drugs," Peter Bach, the director of Memorial Sloan Kettering's Center
for Health Policy and Outcomes, tweeted.
No comments:
Post a Comment