Tuesday, August 27th, 2024

ARIZONA -– After proposing “massive cuts to Medicaid and Medicare,” Kari Lake has gone even further: Lake “defends big pharma’s ability to price-gouge” Arizona seniors and increase their medication costs by millions of dollars as reported by The Copper Courier.  

Kari Lake’s support for Big Pharma would result in almost 400,000 Arizona seniors paying nearly $150 million more in medication costs while Big Pharma rakes in $8 billion more in profits. 

Previously, Lake “[proposed] massive cuts to Medicaid and Medicare,” saying “obviously we have to cut spending and […] I think we can slash the federal government by 50%. Most of it is just grossly overweighted.” In order to reduce the federal budget by 50%, Lake would need to cut $3.1 trillion in spending, which would “gut Medicaid, Medicare, and veterans’ benefits.”

That means Lake would jeopardize healthcare for over 1.4 million Arizonans in Medicare, almost 1.5 million Arizonans on Medicaid, including children, and nearly half a million veterans living in Arizona. 

Read more:

Copper Courier: Kari Lake defends big pharma’s ability to price-gouge as vital to the free market

By: Camaron Stevenson

August 27, 2024

Key Points:

• A popular, successful effort by the Biden-Harris administration to stop price gouging on prescription drugs and cap how much working families pay for medicine has drawn the ire of Republican US Sen. candidate Kari Lake.

• In an interview with conservative media personality John Solomon, Lake incorrectly labeled a new law that allows Medicare to negotiate the costs of ten lifesaving prescription drugs as a tenet of communism, and claimed without evidence that such cost-saving measures would lead to a nationwide food shortage.

• “In an effort to even the playing field, they want to, you know, take away from people who are willing to work, and what you’re going to do is end up with scarcity,” said Lake. “We’re going to end up with food lines, bread lines, the kind of stuff that we saw in communist Russia.”

• The misconception comes from a general misunderstanding of how the medical industry works, and the free market in general. Pharmaceutical companies benefit greatly from government-funded research—to the tune of $30 billion a year—but don’t voluntarily pass the financial relief of those subsidies onto consumers. The end result is taxpayer-funded medical innovations owned by private companies, who until recently, have been able to charge the public whatever they want for the medicine developed by that research.

• Other countries balance this by capping drug costs and allowing the government to negotiate drug costs on behalf of the consumer. As a result, US residents pay four times as much as residents of countries like Mexico, Japan, Canada, and the United Kingdom for the same medicine.

• But some of those costs in the US will soon be going down as a direct result of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Among other initiatives designed to reduce the pressure of inflation from the working class, the IRA capped the cost of drugs like insulin and gave the federal government power to negotiate the price of ten or more drugs every year on behalf of Medicare patients.

• Thanks to recent drug price negotiations, the US Department of Human and Health Services announced Thursday that recent negotiations will lower the cost of lifesaving medicine for cancer, diabetes, and blood clots will save Medicare recipients anywhere from hundreds to thousands of dollars every month…

• Lake urged members of Congress to vote no on the IRA and has repeatedly called for its repeal, a move which would prevent drug price negotiations and remove the $2,000 out-of-pocket cap for Medicare recipients. In May, she blamed Biden and US Rep. Ruben Gallego—her Democratic opponent in the US Senate race—and falsely claimed that a rise in Medicare costs was a result of the IRA…

• The reality, however, is that pharmaceutical companies engaged in price gouging after the onset of the COVID pandemic, which resulted in an average increase in prescription prices by 20% for a subsect of Medicare patients. Those costs will go down drastically once the price negotiations allowed by the IRA go into effect in January 2026—or will remain high, should the IRA be repealed.

• In Arizona, the repeal would mean ending cost-saving measures for over 400,000 seniors, and delivering roughly $150 million in additional profits to pharmaceutical companies, according to an analysis by the US House Committee on the Budget. Nationally, The Center for American Progress estimates that those extra profits for private pharmaceutical companies would amount to nearly $8 billion—a bill footed by over 20 million seniors….

• Manny Hernandez, a US Army veteran from Phoenix who plans to vote for Harris and Gallego, said he’s relieved those on Medicare can now benefit from negotiated drug costs when he qualifies for Medicare. Hernandez has health insurance through the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), which has been able to negotiate drug costs for years.

• Hernandez said he hopes Harris will push further, and empower the government to end price gouging and negotiate medication costs for everyone, not just those on public health insurance. He pointed to his family, many of whom were born with Type I diabetes. As they got older, some of his grandchildren were removed from the state’s public health insurance program for minors, and the cost for medication became a heavy burden for his family.

• “I’m a diabetic, and I’m lucky I got VA. Without it, I’d really be hurting,” Hernandez told The Copper Courier. “So I’m out here helping the seniors and hopefully my children and my grandchildren in the future to lower the prices for them because we got a lot of diabetes in our family.”