This week, The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board provided a megaphone to what I’ve been asking for months: Is the Biden administration making excuses to regulate (or outright eliminate) pro-consumer healthcare groups just to bring us a step closer to socialized medicine?
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On Sept. 20, Lina Khan and the Biden Federal Trade Commission did Big Pharma a solid by bringing a complaint against pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), groups that plenty of government agencies and private sector employers hire to challenge the drug companies into lowering their prices.
PBMs are specialists in managing health plans and pulling every trick in the book to strong-arm Big Pharma into lowering drug costs. They are so effective that every business wants to use them. Over 275 million Americans are now part of health plans that PBMs administer.
It’s no coincidence that the money-hungry companies under the Big Pharma umbrella have been spending billions of dollars in a push to have Washington lawmakers weaponize the regulatory state against these companies. Like The Wall Street Journal wrote this week, “You have to smile at Ms. Khan portraying big drug makers as victims in her suit.”
The crux of the Biden FTC’s suit is that PBMs have been “artificially inflating insulin prices” by bullying insulin companies into giving them rebates in exchange for ensuring their drugs get used more frequently.
But facts are stubborn things — and the facts show the exact opposite of what the FTC is contending.
The Wall Street Journal found that. “… average insulin out-of-pocket costs fell to $21.19 from $31.52 between 2018 and 2022,” and “nearly 80% of insulin prescriptions cost less than $35 a month out of pocket in 2022.” So, in no way are PBMs inflating consumer costs.
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If PBMs aren’t actually increasing healthcare prices, then why is the Biden administration going after them so aggressively?
I argue because the administration knows that the next step to socialized medicine is having the government set drug prices. That can’t happen if private sector companies are driving market pricing in the industry.
That would explain why the Biden FTC is trying to sue them and radical socialists like Sen. Bernie Sanders are also trying to stop PBMs through legislation.
What’s puzzling, however, is to see Kentucky Republican James Comer of all people using the time and resources of the House Oversight Committee to stab at PBMs, too.
Comer believes that Chair Lina Khan and the Biden-Harris FTC’s findings have helped to prove that these PBMs are bad actors. But the FTC’s sole Republican commissioner, Melissa Holyoak, opposed the release of the FTC’s interim staff report on this matter, arguing that it was not fact-based. In fact, before the Biden-Harris administration took over, the FTC advocated on behalf of PBMs, only to rescind the guidance for reasons that are unclear.
Rep. James Comer is a good man. I don’t question his motives or intentions, but I do question why he’s putting so much stock in the political talking points of a few Democratic politicians. Very rarely does that present good news for American consumers, and now is not one of the few exceptions.
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The American people don’t want socialized medicine. They see the destruction that it’s caused in every country where it’s been tried. That is why every bill that would bring it to the United States never gets anywhere in Congress.
It would be a shame if the Biden administration succeeds in using the court system to force this dangerous dose of socialism down all our throats. Hopefully, the leaders within our judicial system and Republicans in Congress do everything they can to stop them.