Cory Lewandowski writes for Townhall.com about the Biden administration’s impact on drug prices.
What is it about Big Pharma that enamors the Biden administration?
Is it that the major drug companies donate heavily to leftist causes?
They donated nearly $6 million to President Joe Biden’s campaign — four times what they provided to President Trump — and, according to the American Accountability Foundation, they’ve given hundreds of thousands to the Democratic Governors Association, Democratic Attorney Generals Associations, and other similar Democratic-connected groups on the state level.
Is it that they support leftist interest groups, like unions, pro-amnesty groups, and abortion advocacy organizations?
Whatever the reason for this unholy alliance is, it’s costing the American people dearly.
This problem has gotten especially pronounced over the last week.
Rather than return to work after July Fourth weekend recharged with firecracker energy to help low and middle-income Americans deal with this record spout of inflation, the Biden administration came back with a plan of putting a ticking time bomb on their ability to obtain affordable drugs.
On Monday, Biden’s Federal Trade Commission, led by radical socialist Lina Khan, issued a troubling report that PhRMA, the trade association that represents all the major drugmakers, quickly endorsed after spending millions of lobbying dollars on this very issue.
This endorsement wasn’t exactly surprising. Khan’s report can only be described as a blueprint for new punitive regulations on one of the only allies that American consumers and businesses have to challenge Big Pharma’s stranglehold over the marketplace.
Those allies, called pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), are the groups that health plans contract with to challenge Big Pharma at the negotiating table and secure better pricing deals for the American people.
The billions of dollars PBMs save the country every year aren’t exactly a secret. Research from Casey Mulligan, the former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Donald J. Trump, shows they save us hundreds of billions of dollars annually.
