Pharma bent on changing Medicare Part D

The pharmaceutical lobby is working doggedly to dismantle talks to reform Medicare Part D, health policy expert Avik Roy writes in Forbes. 

A bipartisan effort in Senate has been underway to restructure Medicare’s prescription drug benefit, capping seniors’ out-of-pocket costs at a fixed point. Doing that alone, however, would incentivize drug makers to jack up their prices, with taxpayers cumulatively paying for the difference. So the Senate has also proposed capping the growth of government subsidies to drug makers, based on inflation.

The idea is that, while pharma could increase prices faster than inflation, they’d have to return any subsidies they would receive above the inflation rate, Roy writes.

Drug makers are working to remove the cap on subsidies, arguing that it's effectively a “price control.”