Biden has been talking about lowering prescription drug prices for almost three years.
He stopped Trump's plan to reduce insulin for diabetics to a maximum of 35 dollars per month.
Biden has not caused any reduction in prescription drug prices.
Do you ever use your brain?
Social media posts claim President Joe Biden overturned an executive order signed by his predecessor Donald Trump that aimed to lower insulin costs for US diabetics. This is false; Biden froze for 60 days the implementation of all federal rules created but not yet put into effect by the previous administration and, if applied, Trump’s proposed change would only cut drug prices for a limited number of Americans.
The final rule implementing the order was to take effect on January 22, 2021 but, two days earlier, on the first day of his administration, Biden’s Chief of Staff Ronald Klain issued a memorandum for a regulatory freeze. It aimed “to ensure that the President’s appointees or designees have the opportunity to review any new or pending rules.”
This action did not automatically reverse or rescind Trump’s order regarding insulin, as claimed in the social media posts.
Such a freeze is also not unusual for an incoming administration, Jing Luo, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Pittsburgh, told AFP via email.
Trump’s chief of staff Reince Priebus issued a similar memorandum on January 20, 2017.
During the 2020 presidential campaign, Trump touted his order on insulin in ways that made it seem as if it would have a broad impact on prices, but the rule was narrowly targeted, according to Rachel Sachs, associate professor at the Washington University in St Louis School of Law.
“The rule as it was finalized would never have applied to all or even most Americans,” she said by phone.
If implemented, it will require that Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) -- which serve about one in 11 Americans, including homeless and vulnerable populations -- offer the discounted price they receive when they purchase insulin and injectable epinephrine (EpiPens) through a federal program called 340B.
Sachs said these centers already provide some free care and discount drugs for people living at less than 200 percent of the federal poverty level, meaning $34,840 for a family of two. The new rule would expand those discounts to FQHC patients with incomes up to 350 percent of poverty -- $60,970 for a family of two.
“Those are very important patients that we should be caring for,” Sachs said, but the exact number of additional patients who would have seen discounts is far from all diabetics who are facing large insulin bills.
The University of Pittsburgh’s Luo agreed that “the number is small since only about 30 million total people receive care at FQHCs and certainly a minority of them have diabetes and a minority of those use insulin.”
While the Biden administration has not yet indicated how it views the rule, the freeze was welcomed by the National Association of Community Health Centers (NACHC).
“Certainly, the high cost of prescriptions remains a national crisis – but health centers are already part of the solution to this problem, and the regulation would have burdened them with excessive red tape without doing anything to lower how much drug companies charge for drugs,” Tom Van Coverden, President and CEO of NACHC said in a press release.
Karyn Schwartz, a senior fellow at the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF), a non-profit organization focused on national health issues, said by phone: “This rule did not impact the drug industry directly at all. They’re not going to be paying for the fact that some people would be getting insulin at lower prices.”
Rather, the cost of new beneficiaries of the insulin discount would have to be covered by existing FQHC funding.
Such a rule could decrease the amount of money available for other services, according to Schwartz.
More than 100 members of Congress signed a September 20, 2020 letter calling for the rule to be repealed or not enforced.
$35 price cap
One voluntary program initiated by the Trump administration and impacting insulin prices did go into effect in January 2021.
The program, announced in May 2020 by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, sees more than 1,750 Medicare Part D prescription drug plans and Medicare Advantage plans cap co-payments for insulin patients at $35 per month.
This savings is now available to many of the 3.3 million Medicare beneficiaries who use one or more of the common forms of insulin.
