A 30-year campaign to control drug prices faces another failure
WASHINGTON — When a powerful Democratic Senate chairman assembled his Special Committee on Aging to confront what he called a “crisis of affordability” for prescription drugs, he proposed a novel solution: allow the government to negotiate better deals for critical medications.
The year was 1989, and the idea from that chairman, former Sen. David Pryor of Arkansas, touched off a drive for government drug-price negotiations that has been embraced by two generations of Democrats and one Republican president, Donald Trump — but now appears at risk of being left out of a sprawling domestic policy bill taking shape in Congress.
Senior Democrats insist that they have not given up the push to grant Medicare broad powers to negotiate lower drug prices as part of a once-ambitious climate change and social safety net bill that is slowly shrinking in scope. They know that the loss of the provision, promoted by President Joe Biden on the campaign trail and in the White House, could be a particularly embarrassing defeat for the package, since it has been central to Democratic congressional campaigns for nearly three decades.
“Senate Democrats understand that after all the pledges, you’ve got to deliver,” said Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., the chairman of the Finance Committee.
“It’s not dead,” declared Rep. Richard Neal, D-Mass., the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee.
But with at least three House Democrats opposing the toughest version of the measure, and at least one Senate Democrat, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, against it, government negotiating power appears almost certain to be curtailed, if not jettisoned. The loss would be akin to Republicans’ failure under Trump to repeal the Affordable Care Act, after solemn pledges for eight years to dismantle the health law “root and branch.”
And after so many campaign-trail promises, Democrats could be left next year with a lot of explaining to do.
“It would mean that the pharmaceutical industry, which has 1,500 paid lobbyists, the pharmaceutical industry, which made $50 billion in profits last year, the pharmaceutical industry, which pays its executives huge compensation packages, and which is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to defeat this legislation, will have won,” Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., the Budget Committee chairman, said Wednesday. “And I intend to not allow that to happen.”