The Medicare prescription drug plan House Speaker Nancy Pelosi introduced Thursday coincided with the release of an Axios analysis showing that the health care industry "continued to rake in record-level profits in the second quarter, with its year-over-year earnings increasing by 23%." Not at all shockingly, Mitch McConnell wants big pharmaceuticals to keep every penny.
Pharmaceutical firms and hospitals are at the top of the heap, Axios says, in raking in the most money—and will aided by the Trump tax cuts. "Big Pharma remains the cash king," says Axios. "Drug companies collected almost half of all health care profits despite generating less than 20% of industry revenue," and comprise 12 of the 16 most profitable health care firms.
Given that, you'd think that finding a way to save the federal government—the taxpayers!—money by negotiating drug prices for Medicare would be a no-brainer for Congress, wouldn't you? Not if you're Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Within hours of Pelosi releasing the plan, Moscow Mitch pulled his "Grim Reaper" act again. He "ruled out any action on the bill," Politico's Burgess Everett reports, saying "Socialist price controls will do a lot of left-wing damage to the healthcare system. And of course we're not going to be calling up a bill like that." (Side note: Knowing McConnell would call whatever House Democrats put forward "socialist," going for the full shebang and saying the 250 most common drugs would have to be negotiated instead of a minimum of 25 and up to 250 probably would have been worth it.)
So Moscow Mitch is PhRMA Mitch, too. Maximizing those drug profits, and making sure the poors and olds don't get too many of those life-saving medicines, is the key. He might have a bit of a problem, though: Trump wants to get this done. "[T]he American people need Congress to help," he tweeted (after taking credit for an imaginary decrease in prescription drug prices. "I like Sen. Grassley's drug pricing bill very much, and it's great to see Speaker Pelosi's bill today. Let's get it done in a bipartisan way!"
Awkward.
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