The best way to score political points is to actually do something about U.S. prescription drug prices. That's the message members of the New Democrat Coalition Health Care Task Force delivered Wednesday to their party leadership in the House, as they requested another vote next week on a package of bipartisan drug pricing bills – this time minus the partisan provisions that Democrats knew would never fly in a Republican-controlled Senate.
Faced with a tradeoff between low Medicare premiums that benefit all beneficiaries and lower out-of-pocket costs that benefit the sickest beneficiaries, the Trump administration chose lower premiums, sinking a proposed rule that would have pulled drug rebates from the safe antikickback harbor.
Now that the dust is still swirling over the news that Scott Gottlieb will leave the FDA, it’s time to conduct a hasty post-mortem on his tenure at the agency, or perhaps more to the point, his lack of tenure. While it’s tempting to frame the question that way, it might be more salient to ask about the nature of the FDA commissioner’s job and whether it is still sufficiently politically insulated to do what is asked of it. Gottlieb had been on the job...
