Doesn’t the govt already decide how much drug companies can charge medicare/medicaid for drugs?
I don’t think so, but it does it to hospitals.
“Doesn’t the govt already decide how much drug companies can charge medicare/medicaid for drugs?”
no.
I don’t think so. If a drug is covered at all, Medicare and Medicaid pay a percentage of the cost based on generic (more) or brand name (less).
Forcing big pharma to negotiate for set prices to Medicare/Medicaid shouldn’t be difficult. If they are locked out of all those customers by denying any payment for those drugs, their businesses won’t survive. A cynical (or smart) government would boycott certain drugs that are overpriced, then buy the patent cheap and resell it to a generic maker. A socialist government would go further and extend “eminent domain” to intellectual property to simply seize drug patents (at a “fair price”). Since the Dims never went that far, I can’t see Trump going that far either.
The government should not be in the business of setting “price controls”, but it is such a large customer for healthcare that alone should give it a lot of power.
Same for the military industrial complex — if the government refuses to buy your products at the current prices, you’d better figure out how to make them less expensive because they ARE your only customer.
They decide what they want to pay and the doctors have the ability to opt out. Which is why quite a few have opted out of the program since o’care was dropped on them. Same thing with the drugs. They negotiate a price, then the provided has the right to say if they’ll accept it. If not, the drug isn’t covered under either program.