“This was an unexpected victory in a long fight against an illegal cartel of three corporations who have raised their insulin prices in lockstep.”
The Biden Administration pleasantly stunned health care reform advocates Tuesday by including short-acting insulin in its list of 10 drugs for which Medicare will negotiate lower prices, power vested in the White House by the Inflation Reduction Act.
The IRA was passed in the face of one of the heftiest barrages of lobbying in congressional history, with the pharmaceutical industry spending more than $700 million over 2021 and 2022 — several times more than the second- and third-ranking industries — much of it aimed at stopping the legislation, watering it down, or undermining its implementation.
Ok, but plenty of people complain about drug prices who don’t have an investment portfolio at all. Like me. Drug prices are ruining people in America. They aren’t in the rest of the Western world. This needs to change. And saying “cancel big pharma” is not a solution. Especially when all of those other countries didn’t do that, they negotiated and got good prices.