News & Blogs

How Vertical Integration—and AARP—Are Driving Up Your Drug Costs

Every year, millions of patients pay their health insurance premiums, trusting their insurer will be there to support them if something happens. What they don’t know is that the same company they’re depending on is pocketing their premiums and taking a cut of their prescription payments. For the tens of millions of Americans enrolled in UnitedHealthcare plans, their prescriptions are being routed through UnitedHealth’s own pharmacy benefit manager (PBM), OptumRx, generating billions in financial windfall.…

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.…

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…

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…

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…

Jon Decker Talks AARP-UHC Partnership with Andrew Langer on Kim Klacik LIVE

Transparency Should Apply To All Forms Of Medicare Insurance

In various committee hearings and markups, Congress continues exploring actions to expand transparency for health care consumers. Such measures hold the potential to give patients the information they need to select their health care options wisely, generating competition that can bring down costs. However, the success of transparency efforts depends upon those measures getting applied evenly and broadly. When it comes to Medicare, that means Congress should ensure seniors have information on all types of…

Germany figured out how to cut healthcare costs: Make Americans pay the bill

Germany has found a convenient way to cut healthcare costs: send the bill for medical innovation to the United States. Under a new policy, Germany will tighten its already aggressive controls on what drugmakers can charge for innovative medicines. The result is predictable: Germany will contribute even less toward the cost of developing new treatments while American patients shoulder more of the burden.