The Congressional Budget Office provides us with a brief description of Nancy Pelosi’s bill to reduce prescription drug pricing under Medicare:
Title I of H.R. 3 would require manufacturers of specific prescription drugs to negotiate with the Secretary for the prices of those drugs or face an excise tax on the sales of those drugs….Maximum fair prices could not exceed 120 percent of the average price—called the average international market, or AIM, price—for a given drug in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom.
And how much would this save us? Here are the numbers:
This adds up to $345 billion through 2029. This is something that, in theory, the Trump administration supports, so it shouldn’t be hard to get it passed. Unfortunately, that would ruin Trump’s claim that Democrats are doing nothing, so it will probably die in the Senate.
