It's the Brian Lara Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. The amazingly smart and funny

and perpetually curious historian and New Yorker magazine writer, Gillipore, is coming

up on today's show that's sure to be a highlight of our week and who knows what we'll talk

about as her new collection of the last 10 years worth of essays ranges from Frankenstein

slash artificial intelligence to Barbie slash Empowerment Feminism to why she wrote a combined

essay about her mother and Jane Franklin, sister of Ben Gillipore coming up this morning.

But we start here. You've been hearing in the news that the Biden administration has

announced the first 10 prescription medications that will now be subject to price negotiation

between the pharmaceutical companies and Medicare, right? Your private health insurance

company can already do this. Now Medicare can, too. I'll give you the list of drugs in

a minute and we'll put this in the larger context of health care policy wars from Obamacare

to next year's presidential race. Here are all the references to health care and health

insurance, all of them, in last week's Republican presidential debate. No, there's nothing wrong

with your device. There's nothing wrong with our feed. Little uncomfortable to listen to

that silence there, right? But the terms health care, health insurance, health care costs,

and prescription drugs never came up in the debate last week. Yesterday, and President

Biden's announcement of these first 10 drugs on the price negotiation list, he said this.

Unless you needed the drugs yourself or knew someone who did, it wasn't as real, but boy,

we've been fighting big farmers for a long time, a long, long time. President Biden yesterday,

and caveat right off the bat, this could potentially still get stopped and we'll get to that,

too. With us now, Jonathan Cohen, senior national reporter at Huff Post, who wrote up yesterday's

announcement. He's also a lecturer at the University of Michigan's Gerald Ford School of Public

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