WASHINGTON (Protect Our Care) —This week, Kamala Harris outlined her priorities to lower health care costs and improve care for American families. Specifically, Harris wants to build on the success of the Inflation Reduction Act and extend its prescription drug savings to everyone, including capping insulin costs at $35 per month and limiting total out-of-pocket drug costs at $2,000 per year. Harris wants to accelerate Medicare negotiations to lower costs for even more drugs and make the tax credits that are helping people afford their coverage under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) permanent. Her plan also includes canceling medical debt for millions of families and building on her work to combat the nation’s maternal mortality crisis. In response, Protect Our Care Executive Director Brad Woodhouse issued the following statement:
“The proposals laid out by Kamala Harris are commonsense measures to lower costs and give the middle class more room to breathe. These policies are widely popular and they will make a real difference for people across America. Vice President Harris is fighting to make sure that working families have access to affordable health care, but Donald Trump wants to go backwards and hike costs on the middle class to pay for more tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. Donald Trump and his MAGA allies have vowed to repeal the ACA and Inflation Reduction Act, slash Medicaid and Medicare funding, take away protections for pre-existing conditions, and raise prescription drug and premium costs. The MAGA agenda will strip millions of their health care and raise costs across the board.
“It’s plain and simple, while Kamala Harris is fighting for hardworking families, Donald Trump is fighting for executives on Wall Street. When it comes to the future of health care, the stakes could not be higher.”
She is so full 0f ****:
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Vice President Kamala Harris are interviewed by CNN’s Dana Bash at Kim’s Cafe in Savannah, Georgia, on August 29, 2024.
BASH: So you have been vice president for three and a half years.
The steps that you’re talking about now, why haven’t you done them already?
HARRIS: Well, first of all, we had to recover as an economy, and we have done that.
I’m very proud of the work that we have done that has brought inflation down to less than 3%, the work that we have done to cap the cost of insulin at $35 a month for seniors.
Donald Trump said he was gonna do a number of things, including allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices.
Never happened.
We did it.
So now, and I — as I travel in the state of Georgia and around our country, the number of seniors that have benefited, I’ve met — I was in Nevada recently.
A grandmother who showed me her receipts.
And before we capped the cost of insulin for seniors at $35 a month she was paying hundreds of dollars, up to thousands of dollars a month for her insulin.
She’s not doing that any longer.
****************
Reuters
“US will still pay at least twice as much after negotiating drug prices”
By Deena Beasley
September 3, 2024
Sept 3 (Reuters) – The U.S. government’s first-ever negotiated prices for prescription drugs are still on average more than double, and in some cases five times, what drugmakers have agreed to in four other high-income countries, a Reuters review has found.
The U.S. Medicare health plan, which covers more than 67 million people, recently unveiled new maximum prices for the first 10 high-cost medicines negotiated under the Biden Administration’s Inflation Reduction Act.
This is the first time Medicare has disclosed actual drug prices, which are largely hidden behind a complicated U.S. system of rebates and discounts.
The lower prices will result in savings of $6 billion in 2026, the first year they take effect, Medicare said.
A Reuters review of publicly available maximum prices set by other wealthy nations – Australia, Japan, Canada and Sweden – show that they have negotiated far lower prices for the same drugs.
A 30-day supply of nine of the 10 drugs will cost $17,581 for Medicare in 2026, compared with $6,725 in Sweden this year.
Comparable prices were not available for the 10th drug, Novo Nordisk’s insulin Novolog.
U.S. ALWAYS PAYS MORE
A study by the non-profit RAND Corp looking at 2022 prescription prices found that U.S. health plans paid more than three times as much for brand-name pharmaceuticals, even after estimated discounts.
Studies have shown that faster uptake of new and more expensive drugs helps drive U.S. prices, while other high-income countries directly footing the bill for healthcare place tighter restrictions on prescriptions.
The willingness of the U.S. to pay up for drugs also contributes to lower overseas prices, said Richard Frank, director of the Brookings Institution’s Center on Health Policy.
“If you’ve got one of your buyers who’s willing to cover your sunk costs, plus some of your ongoing costs,” selling more volume to others, even at lower prices, can still be profitable, he said.
In some cases, lower-cost generic or biosimilar versions of the original branded drugs are already available outside the U.S.
Generic versions of Merck’s Januvia, for instance, have been on the market in Canada since late 2022, while U.S. patents for the diabetes drug are in place until 2026.
Once patents expire on a brand-name drug and copycat versions hit the market, prices fall sharply.
But drugmakers are often able to extend U.S. patent coverage by making small changes to things like dosage or formulation.
There are still no U.S. biosimilar competitors for one of the most expensive of the negotiated drugs, Amgen’s Enbrel, which was first approved in 1998 for rheumatoid arthritis.
U.S. courts have upheld Amgen’s patents, blocking biosimilars until 2029.
Other countries already have multiple options.
Sweden’s price for a 30-day supply of an Enbrel biosimilar is $709, compared with Medicare’s newly-negotiated price of $2,355.
Since most drugmakers hike U.S. prices annually, “the longer a drug is in the U.S. market, the more we pay,” said Mariana Socal, associate scientist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, noting that in other countries prices typically come down over time.
An analysis by the Brookings Institution showed that Medicare’s negotiations yielded the biggest benefit for drugs with little market competition.
It found that three drugs – Enbrel, Bristol Myers’ and Pfizer’s blood thinner Eliquis, and Johnson & Johnson’s Crohn’s disease drug Stelara – will account for more than half of Medicare’s expected $6 billion savings.
Even for the medicines with no generic competition outside the U.S., other governments have set lower prices.
The most Medicare agreed to pay for AstraZeneca’s diabetes drug Farxiga is $179 for a 30-day supply.
Sweden’s maximum price for 30 days of Farxiga’s standard dose is $35, and the price in Canada is about $60.
CCM: WASHINGTON (Protect Our Care) —This week, Kamala Harris outlined her priorities to lower health care costs and improve care for American families.
****************
Yeah, right, Kamala:
“New York approves health insurance rate increases for individuals, small groups – Industry says NY’s health costs among nation’s highest”
By Rick Karlin, Staff Writer, Albany, New York Times Union
Aug 30, 2024
ALBANY — Health insurance rates for many New Yorkers will rise an average of 12.7% for individual plans and 8.4 % for small group policies next year, according to the state Department of Financial Services.
The Hochul administration agency announced its approval of the premium increases Friday.
Emblem’s HIP plan was approved for a 35.6% hike, although they requested a 51% increase.
For small group plans, covering employers with up to 100 people, the average increase was 8.4 %.
Those varied between 1% for United Healthcare to 21.7 % for IHBC.
Representatives of the insurance industry said the increases are driven by rising costs of health care, along with taxes and regulatory schemes that hinder efforts to save money on items like pharmaceuticals.
“New York’s health care costs are among the highest in the country, and several bills that lawmakers approved this session – including restrictions on plans’ ability to contain prescription drug costs, limitations on cost sharing, and new mandated benefits – will further increase costs for consumers, employers, and labor unions,” New York Health Plan Association President and CEO Eric Linzer said in a prepared statement.
The association, which represents health insurance companies, pointed to rising prescription drug costs, including prices on 820 brand-named medications that went up this year.
There are also taxes on health insurance, which they say adds more than $1,000 to the cost of coverage for the average family and government-mandated benefits.
In the Capital Region, several insurers will see double-digit increases.
CDPHP’s Individual plan is up 13.7%; while MVP is 17.9%.
Highmark, formerly HealthNow, is up 26.5% and Fidelis is up 5.9%
For Small Group plans, CDPHP is up 14.9 %; Highmark 11.4%; and MVP 4.5%.