Congress fixed (a piece of) Medicare. It only took a few decades.

An Arm and a Leg

Society & Culture, Medicine, Health, Health & Fitness, Documentary

4.8 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 8 September 2022

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Lots of seniors have to pay thousands of dollars for drugs—even tens of thousands—or do without life-saving medicine. That’s finally going to change.

The new Inflation Reduction Act will set a $2,000 cap on out-of-pocket drug costs for seniors. (Yes, it’ll do a bunch of other stuff too.)

It took a long time. Folks like researcher Stacie Dusetzina spent years building evidence about how Medicare prescription drug policy was failing people with cancer and other conditions.

The pharmaceutical industry fought this change tooth and nail — for decades. Julie Rovner, Chief National Correspondent for Kaiser Health News, takes us on a journey back to the late 1980’s, when Congress learned the cost of messing with Big Pharma.

Transcript
Send your stories and questions: https://armandalegshow.com/contact/ or call 724 ARM-N-LEG
Support us

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hey there, on the afternoon of Sunday, August 7th, Stacey just had seen it was sitting
0:05.2	alone in her office at Vanderbilt University, where she's a professor of health policy,
0:09.7	watching C-SPAN and crying.
0:12.2	The question is on passage of HR 5376 as amended.
0:16.5	I asked for the yeas and nays.
0:18.6	Is there sufficient second?
0:21.4	There appears to be the clerk will call the roll.
0:23.2	The U.S. Senate was voting on the inflation reduction act.
0:26.0	Mrs. Blackburn, Mr. Blumenthal, Mr. Bond, Mr. Bond.
0:28.7	Which, among other things, lots of other things.
0:31.4	It's going to make it so people on Medicare will pay less for really expensive drugs.
0:36.9	The yeas are 50, the nays are 50.
0:39.3	The Senate being equally divided.
0:41.5	The vice president votes in the affirmative, and the bill as amended is passed.
0:47.5	There are a bunch of drug provisions in this new law.
0:51.1	And the one that's gotten the most attention is probably one that gives Medicare the right
0:54.8	to negotiate the price it pays for certain expensive drugs.
0:57.8	And that doesn't get in for a few years.
1:00.2	But maybe a bigger deal, and sooner, by 2025, nobody on Medicare will have to pay more
1:07.1	than $2,000 a year for prescription drugs, which is a huge deal.
1:12.5	It is the main reason that Stacey Ducicino was crying as she watched the Senate take
1:17.0	that vote, because lots of people pay more than that now, more than a million people
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from An Arm and a Leg, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of An Arm and a Leg and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.