Key Points
- President Joe Biden said the federal Medicare program should negotiate prices for at least 50 prescription drugs each year, up from the current target of 20 medicines.
- That proposal is one of several new health-care policy plans Biden will outline during his State of the Union address Thursday.
- But the fate of his new proposals will be in the hands of a divided Congress, making it highly uncertain whether they will pass into law.
I am not an American so there’s parts of this I don’t get. My national health agency negotiates prices for all drugs, thousands of them so this reads weird to ke.
Article says even these measures are uncertain to become law, does that mean it would be even less likely if something more ambitious was planned?
Medicare negotiating prices is a fairly new thing for the US and something that could ultimately be killed by the supreme court (it shouldn’t be, but we have a majority of extremists on the court).
Why it’s uncertain to become law is because our right wing party (republicans) have historically been completely opposed to any social program. Our “left” party is also fairly centrist and arguably even right leaning in parts so it’s uncertain that even with a majority of them in power that improvements would pass.
The problem we have is the filibuster in the senate. It allows any senator to kill a bill. To overturn it takes 60 votes (out of 100) and the senate is currently split 50/50.
The meager changes we got under obamacare literally happened because a republican senator died which opened the gate to ram through a few pieces of legislation which would otherwise not pass. Obamacare was overall an OK bill with some good stuff in it, but it really just re-enforced the current crazy capitalist market system. That was all the right leaning democrats would stomach. There was talk about an option for using government healthcare but that was quashed.
I know all political systems have their problems and limitations, gotta say that sucks especially the part about one man blocking new laws and also having extremists running a court? That’s literally the opposite of what a court should be in my opinion.
I guess that would make it really hard for anyone, even a president, to put meaningful changes in place.
Over here we have a competent leader totally bogged down and derailed by their party extremists. He could be good, but the system itself means he’s really not. Sounds like America has a version of that too.
I assumed you were talking about the UK until you said competent leader.
At least you don’t have an unelected, actively malicious kleptocrat in charge, emboldened by the extremists like we do in good ol’ blighty right now.
Yup. We can pass legislation that says “hey SC, you are wrong about the interpretation of this legislation so do it right”. However, they’ve invented this “major questions doctrine” principle that basically lets them strike down “big” things that they don’t like.
The only solution to that problem is either justices dying or legislation being passed to raise the cap on justices and the president packing the court. Which runs right into the filibuster problem.
At the beginning of biden’s term democrats nearly nuked the filibuster. However, 2 centrist democrats squashed that.