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An Excise Tax On Life-saving Drugs? So-Called Progressives Are Just Getting Started
Townhall.com ^ | October 28, 2021 | Jared Whitley

Posted on 10/28/2021 6:32:56 AM PDT by Kaslin

There’s an old saying in Washington that, “Democrats have never met a tax they didn’t like.” Part of it is because they need capital to pay for their never-ending litany of social programs, bridges to nowhere, indoctrination efforts, and paybacks to campaign donors. At this point though, it seems like their motivation for hitting Americans with new taxes is just spite.

Their latest one is the insane announcement that they want to tax unrealized gains – that is, they want to steal money that hasn’t actually been made yet from people who don’t technically have access to it. Insane, but completely politically inviable.

Slightly less crazy – but much more scary because they might be able to sneak it into law – is Speaker Nany Pelosi’s so-called Lower Drug Costs Now Act. Democrats are, spoiler alert, no friend to the industry that churns out our life-saving, quality of life-improving medicines. Private equity investors – many of them from her home state of California and hometown of San Francisco – are lobbying against Pelosi’s reckless bill, urging her legislative aides in private meetings that the plan would dry up financing for small biotech companies.

Small biotech start-ups lead 70 percent of clinical trials, according to the CBO. Without money from private investors, these companies couldn’t possibly overcome the enormous risk and burden of bringing new drugs to market.

HR 3 demands drug manufacturers to participate in negotiations on the price of their medicine, or at least agree to a negotiated price. If they don’t, the drug in question will be hit with an escalating excise tax – the kind of thing usually reserved for alcohol and tobacco. It would start at 65 percent, according to most reporting, and rise by 10 percentage points each 90 days of “noncompliance,” eventually reaching 95 percent.

But looking a little bit more in the bill – which one supposes we have to pass before we can find out what’s in it – the text of HR 3 opens it up even higher. Rather than describing the applicable rate applying to sales, the text is slyly enough written that this new excise tax rate could reach a maximum of 1,900 percent.

Republicans are justifying their opposition with a report from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office that determined HR 3 would cut the number of new drugs coming to market by eight to 15 over 10 years. Trade group PhRMA gave a much grimmer estimate with 56 fewer medicines. But the White House – which should be behind Pelosi? – claims it could be 100.

Whether it’s eight or 100, if any one of those drugs, pardon the expression, gets canceled by the woke mob, some people will suffer. If any one of those drugs that might be developed were to, say, cure the coronavirus, then the whole world would suffer.

Pelosi’s cheerleaders over at CNBC are defending the bill, even while acknowledging the same fear from investors, that HR3 would save Medicare $345 billion! … over the next decade. That certainly sounds like a big number, but keep in mind that $3.45 billion per year in Washington is not a lot of money – it’s nothing compared to the benefit of 100 new drugs, either from the standpoint of public health or the economy.

New medicine is an economic boon to the research capitals of our country and those who wisely invest in them. Speaker Pelosi’s own San Francisco has benefited endlessly from American capitalism but keep voting to destroy it. While free enterprise has unleashed every medical advancement of the last 100 years – with appropriate government guardrails – there are an increasing number of people who treat free enterprise like the villain.

The health care system needs more free-market momentum, not less. More competition means more choices, lower prices, and more drive to please the customer. Innovation tends to work better than government brutality, which is why people flee socialist countries to come to capitalist ones. HR 3 might make a few anecdotal improvements here and there, but it would mostly punish innovators, muddle the marketplace, and hurt the people the Democrats say they’re helping.

The Democrats never met a tax they didn’t like, and at this point – given how radicalized they have become – they don’t care who gets hurt along the way. They and their lapdog press will insist their new taxes are just for billionaires, but we all know that’s a lie. Crazy taxes on our health care will not make us healthier.


TOPICS: Business/Economy; Culture/Society; Editorial
KEYWORDS: demonrat; healthcare; nancypelousi; taxes

1 posted on 10/28/2021 6:32:56 AM PDT by Kaslin
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To: Kaslin; bitt; ransomnote

TAX FOR LIFE


2 posted on 10/28/2021 6:42:55 AM PDT by ptsal (Vote R.E.D. >>>Remove Every Democrat ***)
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To: Kaslin

These taxes are always sold to us as a “tax on billionaires or millionaires” - as someone pointed out yesterday, that is exactly how the first income tax was sold - as only affecting “the rich.”

These new taxes will quickly filter down until everyone who isn’t on the government dole or pays income taxes (fewer and fewer people these ays)

The government’s idea of anyone “rich” is someone with $600 or more.


3 posted on 10/28/2021 6:48:40 AM PDT by Bon of Babble (Rigged Elections have Consequences)
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To: Kaslin
"All your money are belong to us"!

P.S. You do too.

4 posted on 10/28/2021 7:11:32 AM PDT by Don Corleone (leave the gun, take the canolis)
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To: Kaslin

What would be the motivation for a drug company to participate in the price negotiations? If they are penalized with an excise tax, the retail price would be raised and consumers stuck paying higher prices. As usual, dumb idea by the left the ultimately hurts those they ostensibly want to help.


5 posted on 10/28/2021 7:28:19 AM PDT by Made In The USA (Ellen Ate Dynamite Good Bye Ellen)
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To: Made In The USA

They do not want to help anyone in any way, shape, or form. All about power and $$$.


6 posted on 10/28/2021 7:37:33 AM PDT by madison10 (Let's Go, Brandon! Maggots for you, Fauci!R)
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To: Kaslin
Part of it is because they need capital to pay for their never-ending litany

Slight error there, it’s not “capital to pay for”, it’s “capital to sacrifice at the altar of”...

7 posted on 10/28/2021 7:57:53 AM PDT by no-s (Jabonera, urna, jurado, cartucho ... ya sabes cómo va...)
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To: ptsal

Good idea to tax the ‘vax jab booster’ to pay medical costs for correcting all the spikes released from the ‘jabs’. After all, Big Pharma was let off the hook for future medical liability from the shots, and the Feds don’t pay squat for CoVID health care costs from CoVID.

We should be sequestering the $50k currently be paid to health care providers for hospitalized cases in a lockbox for future payouts to ‘jabbed’ victims.


8 posted on 10/28/2021 9:32:57 AM PDT by RideForever (One of the CoVID naturally immune control group)
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To: Made In The USA

By the time you add Medicare, Tricare Life, Tricare Prime is set to take huge hits, Medicaid, that is a lot of people using it, all prices are PRE-NEOGIATED, 1 of the reasons Walgreens stopped taking Tricare Life a few yrs ago. Add in private, that is a ton of GRAFT, FRAUD, THEFT.

They have been quite about the Medicare hike, it was $148 last year. Now tons of illegals/refugees are being dumped on what they didn’t pay into or earn.


9 posted on 10/28/2021 9:43:25 AM PDT by GailA (Constitution vs evil Treasonous political Apparatchiks, Constitutional Conservative.)
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