Biden and Harris Vow to Crack Down on Big Pharma, But There’s a Major Catch
Elizabeth Troutman Mitchell /
President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris slammed Big Pharma for “inflating the price of lifesaving medications” in a speech Thursday in Largo, Maryland. But Biden and Harris’ congressional campaigns received $9 million and $2 million, respectively, from 1990-2024.
“Folks, this is a fight all of us have been fighting for a long time,” Biden said. “Thinking about Big Pharma, we pay more for prescription drugs, it’s not hyperbole, we pay more for prescription drugs than any advanced nation in the world.”
Despite Biden and Harris’ strong anti-Big Pharma rhetoric, Biden was the top congressional recipient of donations from pharmaceuticals and health care products from 1990-2024, accepting more than $9 million. Harris has received the sixth-largest amount of Big Pharma donations out of Congress members, cashing in at $2,308,104, according to OpenSecrets.
“We’re going to keep standing up to Big Pharma,” Biden said. “I fought too damn hard to yield now.
We’re not backing down.”
This was Harris and Biden’s first joint event since he exited the 2024 presidential race.
Harris boasted her record of holding “bad actors accountable” and lowering the cost of prescription drugs.
She said that as attorney general of California, she “took on pharmaceutical companies for deceptive marketing and illegally inflating the cost of drugs,” and “won billions of dollars as the United States fought to pass laws that would make health care more affordable and accessible for all Americans.”
The administration has finally addressed that Medicare was prohibited by law from negotiating lower drug prices, Harris said.
Medicare and pharmaceutical companies have reached an agreement on lower drug prices for 10 drugs. The Biden-Harris administration says this will save American taxpayers $6 billion on prescription drug costs.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS, rolled out a three-year “demonstration project” to subsidize the elevated premiums and keep them low.
Critics say price-fixing drugs increases taxes and reduces patient access to medicine, including cancer drugs.
The Biden camp describes the process of Medicare drug pricing as a process of “negotiation,” conjuring up the image of “give and take” of private sector contracting, but this is not accurate, health expert at The Heritage Foundation Robert Moffit writes.
Rather, Biden is reviving government price controls. Any pharmaceutical research and manufacturing company that does not agree to the “maximum price” of a drug set by Medicare is subject to an excise tax.
Government price-control regimes cause a cost shift from the controlled to the uncontrolled sector of the economy, Moffit says. If pharmaceutical research and development companies are forced to offer drugs below a market price in a huge program like Medicare, the companies have to stop their losses by increasing their prices in the private market serving younger, working families.
While lower Medicare drug prices lower Medicare insurance premiums, those “savings” result in higher premium costs outside of Medicare.
Biden, alternatively, said he would save the taxpayer money and lower the budget by hundreds of billions of dollars.
“It’s all about health care,” Biden said. “It’s about lowering costs for families, about fairness and security.”
Neither the Kamala Harris campaign nor the White House responded to The Daily Signal’s request for comment.
Robert Moffit contibuted to this report.