In a joint statement, US President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris announced a historic agreement with drugmakers to reduce the prices of 10 key medicines for seniors.
The deal, which will save older Americans $1.5 billion and the Medicare federal health insurance scheme $6 billion in the first year, is a significant victory for the Biden administration.
The agreement will reduce the prices of medicines for conditions including diabetes, heart failure, and blood clots. This move is expected to resonate with US voters who are worried about the cost of living.
While the deal was Biden’s brainchild, he has chosen to share the credit with Harris as she ramps up her battle with Republican Donald Trump ahead of November’s election. Harris has already made bringing down high prices a key plank of her election campaign.
US residents face the highest prescription drug prices in the world, leaving many people to pay partly out of their own pockets, despite already exorbitant insurance premiums. The deal is a significant step towards addressing this issue.
Biden highlighted Harris’s role in the deal, saying the “historic milestone” was only possible because the post-Covid Inflation Reduction Act was passed by Congress after his vice president cast a tie-breaking vote in the Senate. Harris added, “President Biden and I will never stop fighting for the health, wellbeing, and financial stability of the American people.”
The deal comes a day before Harris is due to set out her own economic agenda in a speech on Friday, and ahead of her star turn at the Democratic National Convention next week. Harris is trying to keep some distance from Biden’s policies and set out her own stall, with rising prices being top of the list.
According to a Financial Times and University of Michigan poll, more people now trust the vice president to handle the economy than Trump, at 42 percent to 41 percent. Before she took the reins, Biden was at 35 percent, while Trump’s number is unchanged.
