August 16, 2024

Friday, August 16,2024. Annette’s News Roundup.

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Joe is always busy.

U.S. Announces Prices for First Drugs Picked for Medicare Negotiations

The Biden administration said it would have saved $6 billion had the new prices been in effect last year.

The Biden administration on Thursday announced the results of landmark price negotiations between Medicare and the pharmaceutical companies over the prices of 10 costly or common medications taken by millions of older Americans.

Had the new prices been in effect last year, Medicare would have saved $6 billion, administration officials said.

The prices of the drugs, which include widely used blood thinners and arthritis medications, will take effect in 2026. They represent the first time that the federal government has directly negotiated with drugmakers on behalf of Medicare beneficiaries, and will reshape the federal government’s role in a program that covers tens of millions of older and disabled Americans.

“It’s a relief for the millions of seniors that take these drugs to treat everything from heart failure, blood clots, diabetes, arthritis, Crohn’s disease and more,” President Biden said in a statement. “And it’s a relief for American taxpayers.”

It is impossible to tell how much the new prices will save Medicare for each individual drug subject to negotiations. The federal government does not disclose the net prices it pays for medications, which take into account the billions of dollars in discounts the program receives.

Medicare’s Part D program covers most of the costs of prescription drugs that seniors take at home. Approximately nine million Part D beneficiaries took at least one of the first 10 medications subject to negotiations in 2022, according to federal estimates. Some will see direct savings at the pharmacy counter as a result of the negotiation program.

The prices the Biden administration announced were made possible by the Inflation Reduction Act, a climate, health and tax bill signed by Mr. Biden in 2022 that granted the health and human services secretary the authority to negotiate on behalf of Medicare.

The law delivered more immediate benefits to the program’s beneficiaries, including a $35 monthly cap on out-of-pocket costs for insulin, and a $2,000 annual cap on patient costs for drugs taken at home. The $2,000 limit will go into effect next year.

The selected drugs account for some of the highest Medicare spending, have been on the market for years and do not face competition. Medicare officials are not required to publish explanations of how the federal government arrived at the negotiated prices until March.

The number of drugs negotiated by the federal government is set to increase in the coming years. President Biden has called for Medicare to negotiate the prices of 500 drugs over the next decade.

Mr. Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are set to speak later Thursday at an event in Maryland celebrating the Medicare announcement, a sign of the issue’s importance to Mr. Biden’s legacy and Ms. Harris’s presidential hopes. At a series of campaign events last week, Ms. Harris said that efforts to “take on Big Pharma” would be among her first priorities as president.

In his statement Thursday, Mr. Biden noted that Ms. Harris had cast the tiebreaking vote for the legislation that delivered the drug price negotiation program.

The new prices could be especially important in appeals to older voters, who make up roughly 90 percent of the more than 60 million Medicare recipients.

More than half of registered voters 65 years and older in the battleground states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania said in a New York Times/Siena College poll this month that they supported Ms. Harris’s candidacy, a potentially decisive group in an election with slim vote margins.

Prices for Drugs Subject to Negotiations

Prices are the maximum Medicare Part D plans and the patient will pay for a one-month supply.

1. Eliquis, for preventing strokes and blood clots, from Bristol Myers Squibb and Pfizer, $231
2. Jardiance, for diabetes and heart failure, from Boehringer Ingelheim and Eli Lilly, $197
3. Xarelto, for preventing strokes and blood clots, from Johnson & Johnson, $197
4. Januvia, for diabetes, from Merck, $113
5. Farxiga, for diabetes, heart failure and chronic kidney disease, from AstraZeneca $178
6. Entresto, for heart failure, from Novartis, $295
7. Enbrel, for autoimmune conditions, from Amgen, $2,355
8. Imbruvica, for blood cancers, from AbbVie and Johnson & Johnson, $9,319
9. Stelara, for autoimmune conditions, from Johnson & Johnson, $4,695
10. Fiasp and NovoLog insulin products, for diabetes, from Novo Nordisk, $119 (New York Times)

Yesterday in Maryland with KH. Touch to watch the President.👇

Touch to hear “thank you, Joe” 👇

One more thing.

Everyone is feeling the smile campaign.

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Kamala is always busy.

Shepard Fairey helped elect one President. Let’s see history repeat itself.

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Tim is always busy.

On the Debates.

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The Democratic National Convention soon begins.

The Basics.

The convention starts on Monday will take place over four nights from August 19-22, 2024.

Primetime convention programming will air live from the United Center in Chicago from 6:30-11 p.m. Eastern/5:30-10 p.m. Central on Monday and 7-11 p.m. Eastern/6-10 p.m.
Central on Tuesday-Thursday.

What we know so far.

A month ago, Hollywood was largely uninterested in this month’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Now, celebrities are crawling out of the woodwork to join Kamalapalooza—including Uma Thurman, John Legend, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Kerry Washington.

And if the Democratic Party planners’ dreams come true, Beyoncé herself will be there to sing “Freedom” live as Kamala Harris formally accepts the nomination that delegates to the convention have already bestowed upon her. Queen Bey has already granted the Harris campaign permission to make her 2016 hit the theme song for the first Black female presidential nominee, and she is widely rumored to be the headliner on Thursday, Aug. 22, the last night of the convention, when Harris will take the stage to make her acceptance speech. (The Daily Beast).

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Trump and Project 2025.

From the horse’s mouth.

Touch to watch Russell Vought, one of the key writers of Project 2025, speak about Trump’s relationship with them. 👇

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J.D. Vance gets weirder and weirder.

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[The Media’s Double Standard Favors Trump, Not Harris]

(https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/medias-bias-kamala-harris-donald-trump-double-standard.html)

Conservatives are complaining about media bias, as is their wont, especially when Republicans are losing. They are correct that Kamala Harris has enjoyed fairly positive coverage to date. But their conviction that the media are employing a “double standard” is actually backward. It is Donald Trump who is being held to a lower standard than Harris.

The main indictment of the mainstream media (conservatives always pretend “the media” excludes the large share of Republican-controlled outlets like Fox News) is that Harris has been allowed to skate by without specifying her policy platform. That is true, so far. Reporters are probably extending the fair assumption that any new candidate will take a bit of time to settle on a platform. If Harris avoids any substantive commitments by September and the media aren’t making a big issue out of it, I’d be surprised.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump very much is skating by without serious policy commitments. He floated the idea of repealing Obamacare, then backed away, and is continuing to vaguely promise to make health care better for everybody without anybody paying for it. He has made positive noises about cutting retirement programs without specifying how. He is secretly promising huge tax cuts to wealthy donors, while saying he would “be okay” with setting the corporate tax rate just one point lower.

Trump worked closely with the Heritage Foundation to develop a detailed policy agenda, traveling with the group’s president, Kevin Roberts, and telling an audience, “They’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do.” He now disclaims any relationship to the plan and insists, “Have no idea who is in charge of it.”

The media are reporting on some of these questions, especially about Project 2025. But most of Trump’s issue evasions have disappeared from the news, and the press has had almost no ability to force him to take a stand on any issue he prefers not to talk about. Harris, at least, is supposed to be working on an agenda. Trump won’t get more specific until he wins.

The most important way Trump benefits from a double standard is simply that his violations of democratic and civic norms are so widespread that the media have given up on holding him to anything resembling a customary standard of behavior for a presidential candidate.

A recent example will suffice: Imagine if Harris published a statement alleging that a recent Trump rally attended by thousands of people was actually empty, that the crowd at the rally was faked through artificial intelligence, and that the news media helped perpetuate this gigantic fraud. Suppose she proceeded to argue that this alleged fakery was a form of “election interference” that disqualified Trump from the ballot.

This would be an existential crisis for Harris. Cable news would break into its programming to cover this and wouldn’t stop until she was driven from the race. Newspapers would print multiple Watergate-level front-page stories about Harris going stark raving mad and threatening democracy.

Trump did this, of course, and it was a minor story.

The reason isn’t that reporters like Trump or want him to win. The reason is that they haven’t figured out a structural solution to the problem of a candidate whose misconduct, dishonesty, bigotry, and general pathological behavior lie so far beyond the norm. Trump is a yearslong out-of-sample event that blows up every instrument used to measure him. The media have tried, and failed, to capture his abnormality, but no workable solution has presented itself.

The current conventional wisdom holds that, after years on end, stern warnings about Trump’s lying, his authoritarian tendencies, and so on have lost all effect on the public. That may well be correct.

But the upshot of this wearing off is that Trump has succeeded in getting the media to lower the bar to the floor. Indeed, on those rare occasions he manages to sound even somewhat like a regular American politician rather than a scenery-chewing movie villain, at least some reporters will lavish him with praise and speculate that Trump has “changed.”

I won’t claim the media have covered Harris perfectly. Nor would I argue the media have no liberal bias. (I think that bias exists and has gotten more pronounced, though it can mostly be found in cultural coverage and siloed beats devoted to social issues and subjects outside of political reporting.)

But reporting on politics and campaigns still generally follows traditional norms of objectivity. That’s why conservatives work the refs so hard — if the refs were genuinely in the pocket of the opposing side, there would be no point to it.

And those norms happen to work in favor of a candidate who has trained his supporters to ignore all evidence of his corruption and lying. (New York magazine)

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Your Daily Reminder.

Trump is a convicted felon.

On May 30th, he was found guilty on 34 felony counts by the unanimous vote of 12 ordinary citizens.

The Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump was scheduled to be sentenced on July 11. He will now be sentenced sometime around September 18th.

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A positive reminder.

We can win in Florida. Will you do your part?

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