Here’s a Washington truism: Whenever Democrats hold a “celebration” on health care, you can all but guarantee the event means the government is taking greater control. (For that matter, this axiom holds true for Republicans in far too many cases.)
So it proved just before the holiday weekend, when the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released the list of the first 10 drugs over which it will “negotiate” prices with drug companies over the course of the next year. The “negotiation” provisions, which are scheduled to take effect in January 2026, were part of last year’s Inflation “Reduction” Act. And as with most programs the left claims will create a socialist paradise, there’s more to it than meets the eye.
The ‘Negotiations’ Are Rigged
Despite the name of the program, the “negotiation” will prove anything but. The statute explicitly defines a “maximum fair price” — defining the outcome before the “negotiations” even begin.
Under the law, the “maximum fair price” is set from 40-75 percent of current price levels, depending upon how long the drug has been on the market. Companies who refuse to participate in this process have only one of two options: They can face taxes of up to 1,900 percent of the revenue of the product(s) in question — or they can drop out of the Medicare and Medicaid programs entirely.
Democrats had to structure the program this way for two reasons: First, the rhetoric of “negotiations” sounds more appealing to the public than
