EDITORIAL: Take steps to lower drug costs before asking seniors to pay mores
But before Republican leaders rush forward with sweeping "entitlement reforms" -- that's code for asking seniors and future generations to pay more -- they first need to pop the program's hood, run some diagnostics and fix specific cost drivers. Let's give the program, which serves 59.2 million Americans, a thorough tuneup before imposing far-reaching, untested changes.
One such dubious reform championed by
The equivalent of a lit-up dashboard indicator for would-be program mechanics came earlier this month in a review from the
Despite a 17 percent decrease in the number of prescriptions, "total reimbursement for all brand-name drugs in Part D increased 77 percent from 2011 to 2015," the review found. Costs "rose nearly 6 times faster than inflation" during the same period. That didn't just drive federal spending on the program; it also affected Medicare enrollees. The percentage of Part D beneficiaries "responsible for out-of-pocket costs of at least
The trends detailed are troubling for many reasons, but a big one is the program's size. Medicare spending came to
The inspector general merits praise for singling out manufacturers' responsibility for price increases and swatting down common industry defenses -- that marketplace middlemen are responsible, for example, or that new drugs are solely driving costs. That the
It simply makes sense for policymakers to drill down to find better value for Medicare dollars. Ideally, the government would directly wield its massive purchasing power to drive a harder bargain for medications it pays for. But that remains an uphill climb given pharmaceutical companies' lobbying might.
Still, there are other doable solutions. President
The bill "is good policy," said
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