Biden to Sign Executive Order to Order the Lowering of Prescription Drug Prices

President Joe Biden is pushing to get prescription drug prices lowered. The administration says the president will sign an executive order on Friday to look at ways to have that happen.

Biden is going to have the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to instruct its in-house, Innovation Center to find ways to lower drug prices. If you haven’t heard of the center, it was created by the Affordable Care Act and is charged with finding ways to test new payment and payment delivery models for Medicare and Medicaid.

The Innovative Center will have three months to issue a drug pricing report.

Biden’s executive order is going to build on drug price reforms that are imbedded in the recently passed, Inflation Reduction Act. Among the reforms is a law that will allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices and to cap the high cost of insulin. Also included in the reforms is a rule that forces pharmaceutical companies to give rebates to Medicare if prices go over the rate of inflation.

The importance of reforms comes when looking at 1,200 prescription drugs whose prices rose faster than the rate of inflation between 2021 and 2022. Some drugs — says the HHS — rose over 500% in cost.

Source link: The Hill —https://bit.ly/3giaFGZ