Shameful Legacy: Biden Expands Socialist Rx Price Controls in Last Days in Office

In his final days in office, President Biden is redoubling his efforts to inject a socialist prescription drug pricing scheme into the American healthcare market with the ostensible goal of reducing the cost of prescription drugs (click here to read about it). Yet by doing so, he is jeopardizing the development of new miracle cures and treatments.

Lowering the price of drugs may sound beneficial at first blush, but the negative effects of price controls far outweigh the positive. TAPP has highlighted the repercussions of price controls many times.

Price controls lead to drug shortages and limit patient access. In recent years, shortages of treatments including cancer drugs, asthma medication, hormones, and children’s pain medication have become all too common. Maintaining access to treatment and cures is of the utmost importance.

In addition to restricting patient access, price controls would lead to less innovation as well as less research and development. Without a reasonable expectation of recouping their investment, companies would stop funding innovation. 

Americans have grown accustomed to the fastest access to treatment available while patients in other countries literally die waiting for treatment. If we continue on the path of instituting price controls, foreign nations will surpass America as the world’s most advanced medical country.

Americans with a variety of health challenges are living healthier lives because of the work of American pharmaceutical innovators. Yet Biden is upending our country’s innovation ecosystem. Allowing the government to politicize the research and development of new medicines takes away hope from patients and their loved ones. At the same time, it doesn’t address the real reasons why some patients can’t afford their medicines.

This is why the Trade Alliance to Promote Prosperity is calling on the new Congress and second Trump administration to fix the flaws in this law and to rein in practices by insurers and drug middlemen that make medicines less accessible and affordable for patients.