Last month, Republicans and Democrats in Congress came together to announce a historic bipartisan deal on a $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill.   For months, members on both sides of the aisle worked together to negotiate a compromise that will improve the lives of Americans all across the country. As the drama unfolded, we all saw what can […]

New Jersey Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez isn’t ready to commit to voting for a budget blueprint that will count on hundreds of billions of dollars extracted from the prescription drug industry to help offset $3.5 trillion in new spending over a decade. “I’m not ready to make any decisions on the budget resolution,” Menendez said Thursday in […]

Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden has released a document outlining “legislative principles” for controlling drug prices. The major provisions include: Medicare price negotiation and inflation rebates, giving commercial insurers the same drug prices that Medicare negotiates, blocking a Trump-era ban on rebates, and tailoring policies to protect small biotechnology companies. The bill also will […]

The Health and Human Services Department is withdrawing a proclamation broadly calling on drugmakers to offer hotly contested price discounts for low-income health-care providers in an attempt to fend off litigation, but the agency won’t back down from fighting individual companies. The HHS’ 2020 advisory opinion calling on pharmaceutical companies participating in the government’s 340B program to […]

Senate Finance Chair Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) confirmed in a hearing this morning that he’s begun updating the 2019 bill he co-authored with Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) that would have cut subsidies from drug companies that raised prices more than the cost of inflation, POLITICO’s Alice Miranda Ollstein reports.  Specifically, Wyden said he plans to add some kind of Medicare price negotiation […]

Democrats are considering adding Medicare drug price negotiation to the president’s American Families Plan and using budget reconciliation to pass it separately from the infrastructure bill, if a bipartisan deal is struck on infrastructure, drug and consumer lobbyists said. Yet key lawmakers are also going through the motions of negotiating a bipartisan drug-pricing bill. Senate […]

The Biden administration has asked HHS to study whether new reimbursement policies could be used to shore up domestic supplies of critical medicines, including the possibility of new federal payment policies that hike profit margins for certain generic sterile injectables and cancer drugs, procurement guarantees and flexible acquisition policies. Overhauling reimbursement is one of several ways […]

The White House has asked HHS to lead a consortium comprising nearly a dozen federal agencies, the private sector and nonprofit entities charged with crafting a strategy to secure the pharmaceutical supply chain by boosting U.S. production, developing new manufacturing technologies, and increasing the resilience of U.S. and allied pharmaceutical production. The White House will […]

President Joe Biden will direct federal agencies to shore up production and delivery of pharmaceuticals, computer chips, advanced batteries and critical minerals after completing reviews of their supply chains. New task forces, production rules: The actions include a $60 million investment in research for advanced pharmaceutical manufacturing through the Department of Health and Human Services, and […]

President Joe Biden wants to keep drug pricing separate from his new sweeping economic package. But some key Democratic lawmakers said they heard another message in his address to Congress on Wednesday night. Senior Democratic leaders on health care are taking Biden’s endorsement of government drug price negotiations as a green light to try to […]