The same liberal groups that vociferously claimed that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act would lower a family’s health insurance premium by $2,500 a year by the end of President Obama’s first term are now focusing on seniors’ prescription drugs. If they’re as successful holding down drug costs as they were holding down health insurance premiums, seniors can expect to be paying a lot more and getting a lot less.
Medicare Part D, the prescription drug benefit that passed with wide bipartisan support in 2003, has been an unmitigated policy success—on par with the welfare reform legislation that passed Washington in 1996.
And just as liberals gradually reversed much of the welfare law, they now want to unravel Part D.
A coalition of some 300 liberal health care advocacy groups, led by Health Care for America Now, claim that allowing the federal government to negotiate lower prescription drug prices would save the feds $540 billion over 10 years.
Did I mention that those health insurance premiums that liberals claimed would be $2,500 a year lower are actually $3,000 higher?
But if it’s saving money the liberals want, they should be thrilled with Part D because that’s exactly what the program is doing.
As Ethics and Public Policy Center budget expert Jim Capretta points out, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) recently lowered Medicare’s projected costs—How often do you hear that phrase coming out of Washington?—by $137 billion over 10 years. Capretta explains, “Of the $137 billion drop in the Medicare baseline, $104 billion—or 75 percent—was due to the drop in expected drug benefit spending.” Average annual growth in the program has been only 1.9 percent since 2007.
It may be hard for most people to remember, but getting control of rapidly rising prescription drug costs was the most important health policy issue in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Part D was passed because seniors were struggling to pay for prescription drugs.
Part D solved the problem by incorporating competition and market forces, and it worked. Which is why the left can’t let it go. Liberals are determined to make sure that nothing challenges their long-held assumption that the free market cannot work in health care. If they are successful in trying to make drugs more “affordable,” we will all be paying more.
February 26, 2013