Good morning. It's Saturday, September the 2nd. President Biden's heading to Florida today to tour the damage caused by Hurricane Idalia.

Florida governor and Biden would be rivaled for the presidency. Ron DeSantis has no plans to meet with the president today.

Biden's top rival, though, former President

Donald Trump has just entered his fourth not guilty plea telling the court he will not be

appearing in person for his arraignment in Fulton County, Georgia next week. We're going to have much more

on the twice-impeached quadruply indicted ex-presidents' legal situation later in the show.

But I want to begin this morning

with a big policy win for President Biden and the lie that's being told about it by some Republicans.

For 20 years, the pharmaceutical industry has had near complete control of prescription drug pricing

for some 65 million Medicare patients in the United States.

But that will soon change. This week, the Biden administration announced the first 10

drugs that will be subject to price negotiations under a new provision included in the

Inflation Reduction Act. President Biden's signature bill, you will recall, that was passed last year.

Now, the list targets some of the most commonly used drugs that help treat conditions like

diabetes, heart failure, chronic kidney disease, blood cancers, arthritis, Crohn's disease,

as well as blood thinners that prevent strokes and blood clots.

According to the Department of Health and Human Services,

about 9 million Medicare beneficiaries used one or more of these 10 drugs in the past year

and paid a total of $3.4 billion out of pocket for those medications.

That's on top of the $.5 billion dollars that the government spends on these same drugs every year. The federal government is the largest

buyer of prescription drugs in the United States. Now, theoretically, in a market system,

that would mean that it should have some measure of influence over those

...