Biden’s price fixing in doctor-patient relationship is a government directive, not a negotiation
Here are the names of the first 10 drugs subject to price negotiations in Medicare, including several popular blood thinners and diabetes medications. Eliquis, Jardiance, Xarelto, Januvia, Farxiga, Entresto, Enbrel, Imbruvica and Stelara, as well as Fiasp and certain other insulins made by Novo Nordisk, including NovoLog. The medications treat heart disease, certain cancers, diabetes and autoimmune diseases, among other conditions.
But is it a good thing? Americans for Limited Government examine the move in the bigger picture.
Joe Biden is trying to take control of senior’s relationship with their doctors by picking winners and losers on medicines. The Biden administration says it is beginning a ‘negotiation’ with the manufacturers of ten medicines over what Medicare will pay for them, but it’s not a negotiation when the federal government gives you a directive. Try negotiation with the Internal Revenue Service on paying less taxes. Make no mistake, Biden’s government is giving these companies a federal directive and setting a price. The result of these directives will be a not so subtle shift away from doctors prescribing medicines which best treat their individual patients to their being pressured to prescribe other lower cost, but less effective drugs.
This is not conjecture, it is exactly what happens with Medicaid patients in almost every state in America. States create drug formularies based upon similar ‘negotiations’ and doctors are in many cases dictated to prescribe lower cost drugs which in many cases have already failed that patient.
Now Biden is putting into place this exact kind of system for Medicare recipients. A system which prescribes based upon cost to the Medicare system rather than the needs of patients. Like every cancer, it is starting as a little noticed bureaucratic action where federal employees who go home at 4 pm every day and only work every other Friday will effectively dictate to the companies which invent the medicines what can be charged.
Anyone who thinks this is going to end up going well for the patients who depend upon getting the right medicine when they need it simply hasn’t been paying attention to the political abuse of the medical system over the past three years.
No one can legitimately argue against seeking cost savings in the Medicare system, but here is what the deliberately misnamed Inflation Reduction Act actually allows to happen with any savings resulting from these ‘negotiations.’
They don’t go to making the Medicare system solvent. No, instead, savings are diverted away from Medicare solvency and toward green energy projects.
That’s right. While Medicare teeters on the brink of fiscal disaster, the savings will be going to buy Chinese windmills, solar panels and electric car batteries.
In Biden’s America Last world, it might make sense to dictate what prescription a doctor should write for their patient in order to fund a green energy future which puts the Chinese in control of the world’s energy production.
I guess it may be time for Americans for Limited Government to start bidding on some of Hunter’s art work as a last ditch effort to try to slow the Biden administration led planned decline of our nation.
Rick Manning is the President of Americans for Limited Government.
To view online: https://dailytorch.com/2023/08/bidens-price-fixing-in-doctor-patient-relationship-is-a-government-directive-not-a-negotiation/
