Biden to Big Pharma: Gouge Prices and We’ll Snatch Your Patents

When Joe Biden was elected president, Medicare was barred by law from negotiating the prices it paid for the drugs it purchased with taxpayer dollars. For a generation, presidential candidates of both parties had pledged to kill the “noninterference clause” that was the price Big Pharma extracted in 2003 from President George W. Bush to extend Medicare coverage to drugs (“Medicare Part D”). Last year, Biden finally got rid of the noninterference clause as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, and in October, the Health and Human Services Department announced that negotiations had begun on prices for 10 drugs that represent about 20 percent of all drugs covered under Medicare Part D. Changing the law to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices was, as Biden would say, a Big Fucking Deal. If you’re one of those people who tells pollsters that Biden has done a poor job managing the economy, Medicare price negotiation is one of the better examples that prove you wrong.

Now, Politico’s Adam Cancryn reported Wednesday, the Biden administration is in the early stages of curbing excessive prices for drugs purchased not only by government programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare but also in the private market. This time, Biden doesn’t need to pass a law because Congress gave the executive branch that power way back in December 1980, in legislation co-sponsored by Senators Robert Dole, Republican of Kansas, and Birch Bayh, Democrat of Indiana. It was a swan song of sorts for Bayh, whose distinguished 18-year term as a leading light of American liberalism had been cut short one month earlier by the November election, which gave Republicans their first Senate majority since 1955. In one of modern U.S. political history’s unkindest cuts, Bayh lost to Dan Quayle. That election also installed Ronald Reagan in the White House and initiated an era of political reaction from which Biden has been struggling to break free.