Your Best Health Care Now by Frank Lalli

Author:Frank Lalli
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Touchstone

THE PUBLIC WANTS POLITICAL ACTION

No one should be surprised that the Kaiser Family Foundation reported that the public said the top priority for the president and Congress in 2017 and beyond should be making drugs for serious diseases affordable. The number two issue: lowering the cost of all prescription drugs.

Political leaders are listening. The Los Angeles–based AIDS Healthcare Foundation launched a California initiative for 2016 that would mandate that drug manufacturers grant the state’s health programs (including its giant Medicaid program Medi-Cal) a 25 percent discount. A similar movement was under way in Ohio. As you should expect, leading Big Pharma companies lined up to fight the California initiative, including such trusted household names as Johnson & Johnson (pledging $5.7 million for opposition ads), Bristol-Myers Squibb ($2.9 million), Purdue Pharma ($1.1 million), Pfizer, and Daiichi-Sankyo.

As you know, health care became a major campaign issue in 2016. Politicians on the left rallied for Medicare for All, and those on the right vowed to kill Obamacare. But neither of those extremes amounts to much more than fund-raising gambits—red meat appeals for supporter greenbacks. Focus instead on Hillary Clinton’s top four ideas to curb drug prices, plus Dr. Ben Carson’s out-of-the-box musings of souping up HSAs for every family. You will be hearing more about versions of those two sharply different approaches as the left-versus-right health care debate rages on.

Hillary has proposed this series of government reforms:

• Cap Consumer Costs. Under this plan, the federal government would prohibit health insurers from collecting more than $250 a month, or $3,000 a year, from its customers for drugs, a move that in theory would spur insurers to refuse to cover expensive drugs unless the manufacturers gave them steep discounts. California’s ACA health plans are already capping costs at $250 a month, and those limits will extend to all state health plans in 2017.

• Allow Medicare to Negotiate Prices. Federal law specifically prohibits Medicare from negotiating with drug companies for lower prices. Some experts believe that Medicare could use its fifty-million-member clout to save each beneficiary more than $500 a year if it also restricted the number of drugs it agreed to cover, as the VA does. Beneficiaries would have fewer drugs to choose among, but at lower prices. Supporters see it as an acceptable trade-off to help the millions of older and disabled people struggling to afford their medications. But such a major change figures to be debated long and loud.

• Give the Federal Government the Power to Block Profiteering. Many on the left want the federal government to have the authority to prohibit exorbitant insurance company rate hikes and any “excessive profiteering” by drug manufacturers.

• Let Consumers Buy Drugs from Abroad. As you might know, it is illegal to import prescription drugs, including imports from reputable mail-order pharmacies. This cautious proposal would allow Americans only to import medications that drugmakers have exported to Canada to guard against bogus products. Still, Canadian drugs are roughly 30 percent cheaper than they are here.

During the 2016 Republican presidential primary, Dr.

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