Dems Won on Health Care. Now What?

 

Democrats rode a health care message to their Election Day takeover of the House. Now that the election is (mostly) over, how will they follow through on that campaign focus?

The party is still figuring out its next steps on health care, and Nancy Pelosi and her colleagues will have a lot of decisions to make and details to sort out. “The new House Democratic majority knows what it opposes. They want to stop any further efforts by Republicans or the Trump administration to roll back and undermine the Affordable Care Act or overhaul Medicaid and Medicare,” writes Dylan Scott at Vox. “But Democrats are less certain about an affirmative health care agenda.”

Some big-picture agenda items are clear, though. “The top priorities for Ms. Pelosi, the House Democratic leader, and her party’s new House majority include stabilizing the Affordable Care Act marketplace, controlling prescription drug prices and investigating Trump administration actions that undermine the health care law,” reports Robert Pear in The New York Times.

House Democrats also plan to vote early next year on plans to ensure patients with preexisting medical conditions are protected when shopping for insurance, Pear reports. And they’ll likely vote to join in the defense of the Affordable Care Act and its protections for those with pre-existing conditions against a legal challenge now before a Texas federal court.

Here are a few areas where House Democrats will likely look to exercise their newly won power.

Stabilizing Affordable Care Act markets: “I’m staying as speaker to protect the Affordable Care Act,” Pelosi said in an interview with CBS’s “Face the Nation,” calling that her “main issue.” And Vox’s Scott says that “a bill to stabilize the Obamacare insurance markets would be the obvious first item for the new Democratic majority’s agenda,” adding that a bill put forth by Reps. Richard Neal (MA), Frank Pallone (NJ) and Bobby Scott (VA) is the likely starting point. Democrats may look to provide funding for the Obamacare “cost-sharing reduction” subsidy payments to insurers that President Donald Trump ended in October 2017. And they may look to restore money for Affordable Care Act outreach and enrollment programs after the Trump administration slashed that funding by 84 percent, to $10 million, Pear says. “Another idea is for the federal government to provide money to states to help pay the largest medical claims,” he adds. “Such assistance, which provides insurance for insurance carriers, has proved effective in reducing premiums in Alaska and Minnesota, and several other states will try it next year.”

Investigating the Trump administration ‘sabotage’: “Administration officials who have tried to undo the Affordable Care Act — first by legislation, then by regulation — will find themselves on the defensive, spending far more time answering questions and demands from Congress,” Pear writes.

Reining in prescription drug prices: Trump, Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have all pointed to this as an area of potential cooperation, But Vox’s Scott calls this “another area where Democrats know they want to act but don’t know yet exactly what they can or should do.” Some options include pushing to let Medicare negotiate drug prices directly with manufacturers and requiring makers of brand-name medications to provide samples to manufacturers of generics, potentially speeding the development of less expensive competitors.

“There are a lot of levers to pull to try to reduce drug prices: the patent protections that pharma companies receive for new drugs, the mandated discounts when the government buys drugs for Medicare and Medicaid, existing hurdles to getting generic drugs approved, the tax treatment of drug research and development,” Scott writes. But it’s not clear just what policy mix would really work to bring down drug prices, and the pharmaceutical industry lobby is likely to push back hard on such efforts. Democrats may also be hesitant to give President Trump a high-profile win on the issue ahead of the 2020 election.

Medicare for all: Much of the Democratic Party may be gung-ho for some sort of Medicare-for-all legislation, but don’t expect significant progress over the next two years. “House Democratic leaders probably don’t want to take up such a potentially explosive issue too soon after finally clawing back a modicum of power in Trump’s Washington,” Scott writes. And Democrats have to forge some sort of internal consensus on just what kind of plan they want to push in order to further expand health insurance coverage.

Why Are Prescription Drug Prices So High?

http://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2017/jul/getting-to-root-high-prescription-drug-prices?omnicid=EALERT1240145&mid=henrykotula@yahoo.com

Increased prescription drug prices and spending are among the main drivers of health care costs in the U.S. About one-third of the rise in prescription spending from 2010 to 2014 was a result of either price increases for drugs or a shift toward prescribing higher-price products, with patients caught in the middle.

A new issue brief by former Rep. Henry Waxman and his colleagues at Waxman Strategies summarizes major problems behind high U.S. prescription drug prices, while also offering feasible policy actions. For instance, the authors identify the use of patent protection and market exclusivity laws by brand-name drug manufacturers as one driver of high prices.

Among other potential solutions, the authors suggest introducing price competition sooner for such drugs and making government-purchasing arrangements for medications that protect public health

Mylan’s CEO A Villain? Depends On Your Preferred Brand Of Capitalism

http://healthaffairs.org/blog/2016/09/06/mylans-ceo-a-villain-depends-on-your-preferred-brand-of-capitalism/

Image result for capitalism

Different Flavors Of Capitalism

As usual, the answer is a clear “No” and “Yes,” and resolving the question raises much deeper issues than one executive’s personal culpability. The answer depends on what definition of capitalism one deems appropriate. As the European economist André Sapir has noted, there are actually four distinct brands of capitalism in the Western economy, of which the version practiced in the United States and some other Anglo-Saxon countries—sometimes also referred to as “savage capitalism”—is but one.

The clearest version of raw Anglo Saxon capitalism, and one quoted widely to this day, was offered by the late Nobel Laureate economist Milton Friedman in his classic book “Capitalism and Freedom.” There he proposed that the one and only social obligation to society that the CEO of an investor-owned, for-profit company is “to maximize its profits while engaging in ‘open and free competition without deception and fraud.’” (Quoted in Thomas Carson’s “Friedman’s Theory of Corporate Social Responsibility.”) On that view, any corporate action that is legal is ipso facto ethical.

Ms. Bresch can argue that with her aggressive pricing policy on EpiPen she was merely owning up to this doctrine of Anglo-Saxon capitalism. Her board of directors may or may not have known about that policy with regard to this particular product, one of many the company sells. Here Ms. Bresch also can point out that she is in good company in the drug industry. Many drug companies beyond the poster-boys for what is now decried as “price gouging”—Valeant Pharmaceuticals International and Turing Pharmaceuticals—have adopted raw Anglo-Saxon capitalism as the intellectual foundation for their pricing policies by steadily raising prices on long existing drugs, year after year, or even quarter after quarter.