News & Blogs

Medicare’s Drug-Pricing Proposal Carries A Hidden Cost

The Trump administration says it wants to accelerate medical innovation. Yet one new proposal from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services could do just the opposite. The agency has proposed a seemingly technical expansion of Medicare’s prescription drug price control scheme, which was created by the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. CMS wants to treat certain newer medicines as though they were the same product as older ones when determining when they become eligible for government price controls.…

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Trump Fixes a Biden Medicare Trick

The IRA, which Democrats passed on a partisan vote in 2022, let Medicare officials engage in putative negotiations with drug makers. These were de facto price controls, since the penalty for rejecting the government’s “offer” was a 1,900% excise tax on the drug’s daily sales. The law also required drug makers to pay the government rebates on medicines prescribed to seniors if their prices increase faster than inflation. Democrats claimed the “savings” from these two…

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Sen. Tim Sheehy introduces bill to fight foreign drug price manipulation, target Germany’s “freeloading”

Sen. Tim Sheehy (R., Mont.) is introducing legislation Wednesday aimed at ending the practice of foreign governments forcing American patients to shoulder the cost of developing new medicines while paying artificially low prices themselves. The Washington Reporter has learned that Sheehy’s “Use Sovereignty to Reduce Rx Act”, or USTRx Act, would establish a new pharmaceutical trade negotiator at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, require annual reports exposing foreign drug pricing abuses, and create a framework…

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CBO Wins Our Maxwell Smart “Missed it By That Much” Award

Speaking of frauds and cheats, we now dial back to the Biden years when the White House rammed through a Democratic Congress the ironically titled Inflation Reduction Act. HOTLINE readers know we at UP were among the first  policy groups to expose the phony budget “savings” in the IRA from drug price controls and the Medicare Part D redesign. Now it’s official. We were right, as this half-trillion-dollar mea culpa from CBO shows: In its…

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Congress is finally taking on the middlemen driving up your drug costs

Every day, people walk into their local pharmacy and face a price they can’t afford for a drug they can’t live without. Families are being forced to choose between paying for lifesaving prescriptions and covering basic necessities. At the same time, the community pharmacists who provide these critical medications are struggling to keep their doors open. You deserve to know why this is happening and who is benefiting from it. The answer: We are paying the price for PBM greed.

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Opinion: This Is Not the Answer to Soaring Health Care Costs

With health insurance premiums surging again, a growing chorus of economists and policymakers has settled on a cure for American health care: Cap what hospitals, drug makers and insurers can charge. The idea shows up in many forms, including Medicare drug price negotiation, proposals to limit private hospital prices to multiples of Medicare rates, and calls for public plans that pay providers at government-set rates. Their diagnosis is half right. Prices are high, opaque and frequently baffling, and they often do not…

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When insurers deny care, patients pay the price

Mark Cuban, whose new deal with the Trump administration is already lowering prescription drug costs and expanding access for patients, recently asked why health insurers aren’t liable for malpractice when their denials harm patients. As a physician, I have been asking that question for more than 30 years. The answer is the same now as it was then: No one is holding them accountable. It is time to change that.

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Trump was right, Germany was wrong — first on NATO, now on trade

Ten years ago, President Donald Trump put Europe on notice, telling them the status quo on defense spending was unsustainable — and that America would not continue to shoulder the cost of keeping the European Union safe. Trump was right, but leaders such as former German Chancellor Olaf Scholz did not want to listen. Only after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine did they realize their mistake. Fast forward to 2026, and Scholz’s successor, Friedrich Merz, now aspires to command…

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