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September 26, 2023 Policy Proposals, Price and Costs

The House Committee on Oversight and Accountability met last week for a hearing on the Inflation Reduction Act's first year. As one of the witnesses pointed out, the law's implementation — particularly its drug pricing reforms — have already run afoul of some of our government's most basic norms of transparency and accountability. The IRA gives federal officials the authority to dictate what Medicare pays for certain medicines — a scheme intended to reduce the government's drug bill. Late last month,...

September 26, 2023 Briefs, Coronavirus-Alternate2, Issues, Resources, Studies

SACRAMENTO – States that had more invasive COVID-19 restrictions saw small reductions in COVID-19 infection and mortality rates, but saw large negative impacts on employment, economic growth, and children’s education outcomes, finds a new brief released today by the Center for Medical Economics and Innovation at the nonpartisan Pacific Research Institute. Click to download the brief “Looking at the data, states with stricter COVID-19 public health policies did see small health benefits from reduced infections and mortality rates – but at the...

September 21, 2023 Issues, Price and Costs

Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle are examining how industry middlemen known as Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs) are driving up healthcare costs. Rightly so. PBMs have been manipulating the complex and opaque drug pricing system at the expense of patients for far too long and Congress must act. Read the full article by Sally Pipes and Wayne Winegarden at RealClearHealth...

September 6, 2023 Policy Proposals

New vaccines for scourges like malaria and respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV. New cancer drugs that can cut death rates by half or even cause complete remission. The discovery of a biomarker that could identify people who would benefit from investigational drugs for Parkinson’s Disease. Breakthrough treatments that curb obesity and other addictive behaviors. Innovations like these have led The New York Times to declare the 2020s a “golden age for medicine.” But this golden age might be cut short, and a...

August 29, 2023 Innovation, Price and Costs

President Joe Biden celebrated a milestone today—but American patients have no reason to cheer. The White House announced the first 10 prescription drugs that, starting in 2026, will be subject to price controls authorized by the Inflation Reduction Act. Democrats laud these price controls, which they glibly dub "negotiations," as a way to lower drug costs for seniors on Medicare. But in the not-too-distant future, people of all ages may look back and rue this day—as the beginning of the end of...

August 25, 2023 Issues, Price and Costs

The Biden administration claims to support price transparency in healthcare. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has formally warned hundreds of hospitals to comply with federal rules requiring them to post their prices publicly. And the agency just rolled out a new rule designed to “advance prescription drug transparency in Medicaid.” But that drug pricing rule has little to do with transparency. It’s an opaque bid by the White House to impose price controls on drug makers. If implemented, it...

August 21, 2023 Issues, Price and Costs

Who says bipartisanship is dead? In the House and Senate, members of both parties are advancing legislation to check the power of pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), the self-dealing middlemen in the drug supply chain that inflate Americans' spending on prescriptions by billions of dollars a year. By shining a light on PBMs' questionable business practices, and potentially cracking down on some of their anticompetitive behavior, lawmakers can help patients fill their prescriptions without breaking the bank....

August 16, 2023 Innovation, Issues

President Joe Biden just announced a new effort that he hopes will spur the development of better, more precise cancer surgery technologies. The program is part of his administration's "Cancer Moonshot," which aims to halve cancer death rates in the United States by 2047. Ironically, one of the biggest obstacles to achieving that goal might be Biden himself — or more specifically, his policies. The prescription drug price controls Biden signed into law as part of last year's Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) have...

August 14, 2023 Issues, Policy Proposals

Immigration, always a strength for the U.S. economy, has the potential to fill a dangerous and growing labor shortage of skilled nurses. According to nurse.org’s 2023 State of Nursing report, “91% of nurses believe the nursing shortage is getting worse, and 79% report that their units are inadequately staffed.” And it’s not just nurses who recognize this problem. 90% of hospital CEOs report that nursing shortages are their most pressing workplace issue. Burnout from Covid-19 is an important contributor to this problem. A survey by NCSBN (an organization...

August 14, 2023 Issues, Policy Proposals

Congress is looking to narrow our nation's doctor shortage. After introducing legislation that would reform our primary care system, Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders (I-VT) said last month , "Tens of millions of Americans live in communities where they cannot find a doctor while others have to wait months to be seen." The Vermont socialist is right. Too many people do struggle to find a doctor. But his preferred solution — spending tens of billions of taxpayer dollars to recruit and train...

August 2, 2023 Issues, Policy Proposals

Beneficial healthcare change is occurring – in a bipartisan manner too. The reform, referred to as the Transparency in Coverage (Tic) rule, improves the functioning of the healthcare market; and unlike the calls for price controls or increased government distortions, improving the efficiency of the healthcare market can achieve the core goals of promoting greater healthcare affordability and improving the quality of care. TiC went into effect July 1, 2022. Unique among today’s partisan rancor, the TiC rule was issued under the Trump...

July 30, 2023 Innovation, Issues

The nonprofit group Patient Rights Advocate just published its fifth report exploring how hospitals are complying with federal price transparency requirements. About two-thirds are still flouting the rules. That's unacceptable. Noncompliant hospitals are preventing patients and payers from shopping around for high-value care — and inflating healthcare costs in the process. The price transparency regulations went into effect in January 2021. Hospitals are now required to publish the prices they have negotiated with each insurer for every service they provide. They must also display the cost of 300 "shoppable"...

July 25, 2023 Issues, Price and Costs

The last few months have seen a flurry of activity on Capitol Hill regarding prescription drug reform, with a particular focus on pharmacy benefit managers, or PBMs. The U.S. Senate Finance Committee is set to markup a bipartisan PBM reform bill within the next few days. The House Energy and Commerce Committee and the House Committee on Education and the Workforce are weighing PBM reform legislation of their own. All these efforts have an eye on reducing drug costs for patients. Click to read the full article in...

July 17, 2023 Issues, Price and Costs

The Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee is currently reauthorizing the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act (PAHPA), which is supposed to help us prepare for the next public health emergency. Never missing an opportunity to impose price controls on anything and everything, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) wants to use this legislation to benchmark the price of innovative medicines that received some federal support at the basic research stage to the prices in the other G-7 nations. Since these nations...

June 28, 2023 Issues, Price and Costs

It’s been less than a year since Democrats enacted the Inflation Reduction Act, which gives Medicare the power to set the prices of certain medicines. Those price controls have yet to go into effect. But Democrats already want more. They’ve introduced new legislation that would amp up those price controls — and even permit the government to refuse to cover drugs in order to drive a harder bargain with pharmaceutical companies. As for the patients who would benefit from those drugs —...

June 27, 2023 Innovation, Issues

A new Senate bill takes aim at one of the chief drivers of the high out-of-pocket drug costs that many consumers are experiencing — middlemen known as "pharmacy benefit managers." Introduced in mid-June by a bipartisan group of senators including Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Ranking Member Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, the Patients Before Middlemen Act — or PBM Act, for short — would shed some much-needed light on a part of the pharmaceutical market that has been in the shadows for too long. Few companies exert...

June 26, 2023 Issues, Price and Costs

Hundreds of lifesaving therapies will never be invented, and as many as 1.1 million jobs will be lost if Senate Democrats successfully expand their prescription drug price-fixing program, according to a major new study. The study, conducted by the research group Vital Transformation, modeled the effects of the SMART Prices Act. Sponsored by 28 Democratic senators including Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., Peter Welch, D-Vt., and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., the bill would expand the price-control scheme approved last year for certain drugs under Medicare as part...

June 19, 2023 Issues, Price and Costs

Pharmaceutical giant Merck announced last week that it is taking the federal government to court over the Inflation Reduction Act's drug pricing reforms. The lawsuit alleges that the law's Medicare price negotiation program violates some of the most fundamental rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. "This is not 'negotiation,'" the company says in its official complaint. "It is tantamount to extortion." Such strong language is justified. The IRA's price controls represent an unprecedented act of government intervention into the prescription drug market — one that...

June 4, 2023 Innovation, Issues

Patients in several states could soon find it easier to access life-saving medical care, if state legislators and executive officials eliminate so-called certificate-of-need restrictions for new acute-care hospitals in rural areas. Certificate-of-need laws require health care providers to get a state government’s sign-off before building new facilities, expanding existing ones, or even purchasing new equipment. These laws are currently on the books in nearly three dozen states. It makes little sense to artificially restrict the supply of medical care when our nation...

May 22, 2023 Issues, Policy Proposals

America is facing a chronic doctor shortage. Solving that problem will require not just more doctors but a much bigger role for advanced-practice nurses in our healthcare system. A 2021 report found that the United States will need nearly as many as 48,000 more primary care doctors by 2034 to meet patient demand. It’s infeasible to train that many more new doctors over the next decade. We need to make better use of the supply of healthcare professionals we have. In nearly...