United States: Congress representatives Scott Peters (D-Calif.) and Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-Iowa) made a statement that policymakers are required to balance out savings and innovation owing to the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which was in force around two years ago.
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According to Peters, who is the representative of San Diego, which is the place where many drug outfitters belong, has been evidently pushing back his party’s plans to cut down drug costs.
He even warned on Thursday against implementing a short-term focus on savings, with no consideration put on the long-term costs to Americans.
According to him, “You would not come home and tell your family we can save USD 10,000 by not fixing the roof because you think about the USD 30,000 you’re going to lose next year when it rains,” as the Hills reported.
IRA empowered Medicare to negotiate the cost
In a major development, the IRA has made it powerful enough to let it negotiate the cost of pharmaceuticals by providing it with a list of the ten most popular used drugs, which have relatively high costs, to start off.
Although Peters does support the IRA, he also asked to be cautious if the lawmakers breach the threshold by overly restricting profits, then drugmakers would not be left with any incentive to untilized the fund for the development of new drugs.
While referring to drug producers, he said, “They can’t make a return; they won’t make those investments,” as the Hill reported.
Importance of incentivizing drug makers
The recently held panel, “Medicare & Drug Pricing: Time to Think Differently,” happened to be hosted by the Hill and was backed by the Alliance for Aging Research.
In the panel, Peters took the importance of incentivizing drug makers to innovate and also pointed out that the foreign prominence of the once-American semiconductor chips industry can be taken as a warning for the coming days, to take the example for the US pharmaceutical industry.
According to him, “The innovation economy is so important, and this is part of it,” and “We’re competing with people who want to take that.”
Additionally, in May 2021, when Peters was joined together by nine of the Democratic colleagues in the House in order to voice against an early version of the IRA.
According to him, the early version of IRA “would have made drugs eligible for negotiation the minute they came out,” which threatened to “kill the industry.”
He added of the IRA, “We did achieve the objective of protecting patients at the counter at USD 2,000 a year,” and, “We also added a cap on insulin spending at USD 35, so we provided the same relief for seniors that we set out to do at the beginning.”