Top congressional Democrats are acknowledging for the first time that they’ll have to scale back their drug pricing plans to win centrist votes for their giant social spending package.
Leadership may drop efforts to have the government directly negotiate the prices for medicines in private insurance plans and make fewer drugs subject to negotiations in Medicare, among the changes under consideration.
It’s a sign the drug industry is bending a potential compromise in manufacturers’ favor after spending more than $171 million lobbying in the first half of this year, including fighting House leadership's set of proposed price controls. But a more industry-friendly outcome could slash hundreds of billions of dollars in projected savings from the Democrats’ social spending bill, H.R. 5376 (117), and antagonize progressives who promised they'd enact tough new measures to reel in pharmaceutical costs.
“It is alarming that a very modest bill could become even weaker,” said Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas), who chairs the health subcommittee of House Ways and Means. “I’m aware of how tight our vote is, but I don’t believe any of the changes … do anything other than make it approach meaninglessness.”
The Democrats’ thinking on drug pricing and a swath of other policies was recently scrambled by efforts to pare the overall size of the social spending package from $3.5 trillion to win over holdouts like Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.).
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