DAILY CALLER NEWS FOUNDATION—The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced in September that it would be reducing certain Medicare prescription drug premiums in what experts who spoke to the Daily Caller News Foundation called a ploy to buy votes before the November election.
Enrollees in the Medicare Part D prescription drug benefit are slated to have lower average monthly premiums for their pharmaceutical drugs next year due to the Biden-Harris administration pouring billions into subsidies for insurers, with premiums set to fall $7.45 from $53.95 in 2024 to $46.50 in 2025, according to a press release from the agency.
The move by the Biden-Harris administration is a political bribe aimed at securing the votes of Americans aged 65 and over who have the highest voter turnout historically, experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“The $2,000 cap [on Medicare out-of-pocket prescription drug costs], as well as other Inflation Reduction Act provisions were slated to triple the cost of Part D,” said Michael Cannon, director of health policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. “If millions of senior citizens see their premiums triple, they’d go to the polls and vote out those responsible. The Biden administration wanted to avert that.”
Premiums were slated to rise in 2025, largely due to a $2,000 cap on Medicare out-of-pocket prescription drug costs enacted as part of provisions in President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act that go into effect next year. To stave off the increase, the White House set up a “stabilization” demonstration program for 2025 that will offer Medicare Part D insurers $15 a month per enrollee in exchange for keeping premiums roughly stable, an initiative that is estimated to cost taxpayers $5 billion in 2025.
“This is absolutely political,” Joel White, founder and CEO of health care consulting firm Horizon Government Affairs, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “They are buying down premiums to buy votes.”
Senior citizens have had the highest voter turnout of any demographic in every presidential election since 1996, with nearly 80% of adults 60 and over voting in 2020. The U.S. population of senior citizens is also growing faster than any other age group, and four key swing states—Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Arizona—rank in the top 20 in the share of their population aged 65 and over.
“[Democrats] are not lowering premiums. They’re hiding premiums,” Cannon said. “This ‘demonstration project’ is merely a vehicle for channeling $5 billion to Medicare Part D insurers in order to keep the amount enrollees have to pay toward their premiums below what it is this year. The White House isn’t lowering premiums by lowering costs, they are doing it by passing the cost on to taxpayers rather than enrollees … . That has been Democratic health care policy going all the way back to the [Harry] Truman administration: Hide the cost of health care by shipping it to taxpayers.”
The Biden-Harris administration issued a press release Sept. 30 touting its record on prescription drug costs, saying, “While Big Pharma made record profits, Americans footed the bill for the industry’s price hikes. Not anymore. Thanks to my Inflation Reduction Act.” Meanwhile, Vice President Kamala Harris’ “New Way Forward” economic plan stated that, “Harris, along with President Biden, took on Big Pharma and won.”
“The [demonstration program] is a Band-Aid that does not address the underlying wound. The [Inflation Reduction Act] radically rewrote the law in ways that fundamentally destabilize the market,” White told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The Biden-Harris administration has taken a number of actions aimed at reducing drug prices, including proposing new guidelines in 2023 that would give it the power to seize patents from drug companies, so long as the protected products’ prices are considered too high and have received funding from the federal government.
The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services announcement comes roughly four years after Democratic lawmakers and the press attacked former President Donald Trump’s September 2020 proposal to provide $200 discount cards for prescription drugs to 33 million seniors, with The New York Times describing it as an “election-eve promise with dubious legal authority” and Rep. Frank Pallone, D-N.J., calling the move a “blatant political gambit.”
“It’s all pretty transparently crooked, and yet you have The New York Times praising this sham demonstration program,” Cannon said. “This initiative is fundamentally antidemocratic and unconstitutional.”
“The sudden decision is an attempt to curry favor with this particularly massive voting bloc,” said Peter Earle, senior economist at the American Institute for Economic Research. “Repeated efforts to eliminate or reduce student loan debt and the huge gift to climate activists dubbed the ‘Inflation Reduction Act’ are other, earlier instances of the same type of conduct … . Politically motivated redistribution is a mainstay of Washington, D.C., of course, but as both the debt and deficits of the Biden administration testify, it has escalated dramatically over the past four years.”
The White House and the Harris campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Originally published by the Daily Caller News Foundation
This article was originally published at www.dailysignal.com
