Democrats Are Always Ready With the Wrong Prescription

President Biden inherited a recovering economy and a rapidly developed pipeline of treatments and vaccines to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. Ignoring these gains, Democrats shocked the system with a $2 trillion “cure” for what did not ail it.

A year and a half later, inflation has soared to new heights, a recession looms, and a new COVID-19 variant is running rampant. Democrats’ prescription is an innovation-stifling drug price control scheme that will result in fewer cures for sick Americans.

Disrupting the Innovation Pipeline

Pharmaceutical research and development in the United States produces life-saving vaccines, treatments, and cures. The global COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated the value of a thriving U.S. life sciences industry as Operation Warp Speed helped scientists deliver vaccines and treatments in record time. A recent study estimated that these innovations saved 20 million lives worldwide last year. The Biden administration decided to retire Operation Warp Speed instead of building off its historic success.

This kind of biomedical science is research-intensive and very costly. Among drugs that enter clinical trials, only around 12% are ever approved. For medications that make it to market, one study found that four out of every five new drugs make less than their capitalized development costs. Scientists rely on revenue from their successes to fund future breakthroughs.

But Democrats’ price-setting plan would slash manufacturers’ revenues and squeeze the innovation pipeline. Their bill would force drug makers to accept the arbitrary price set by Washington bureaucrats or face unprecedented, company-ending, constitutionally dubious financial penalties as high as 95% across all drug sales. They would tie price caps to the consumer price index – even as inflation has climbed at more than three times the rate of prescription drug prices in the last year. One study of a similar proposal projected that the plan would cause research and development to plummet by 18.5%, leading to 135 fewer new drugs by 2039 and 31 times the loss of life years than the U.S. suffered during the first two years of the COVID pandemic.

Democrats’ price controls would also result in higher launch prices for new medicines that make it to market and hinder cost-cutting competition by deterring generic and biosimilar development and market entry.

Their plan is a prescription for fewer cures.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Congress can work together in a bipartisan way to lower drug costs and reject a future with fewer medicines.

In 2021, Democrats refused to allow basic economics to interfere with their progressive policy dreams. They still haven’t learned their lesson. Their reckless price control plan will lead to fewer discoveries happening in America’s labs. Before Democrats force through another dangerous, partisan scheme, they should answer some important questions: Which diseases do they not want to treat? Which patients do they want to suffer?