If your grandma wants to overpay for prescription drugs, elect Tom Kean Jr. | Editorial
Seniors, be prepared: If Tom Kean Jr. is re-elected and gets his way, you’ll have to pay a lot more for your prescription drugs or manage without them.
He’s Big Pharma’s man in Congress. Kean has taken more than $1.1 million in campaign contributions from the pharmaceutical and insurance industries, a charge that his campaign has not refuted.
Why does Big Pharma love him? Because he opposed the reform President Biden signed into law that allows Medicare to negotiate discounts for seniors, a law that also capped their out-of-pocket expenses at $2,000 a year, starting in January. And it capped the cost of insulin at $35 a month.
Keep in mind, Kean’s opposition to negotiated discounts means that Big Pharma has been able to charge whatever it wants, driving up costs for both the government and seniors. The reform phases in negotiated discounts, starting with the most commonly used drugs.
The CEO of AARP, Jo Ann Jenkins, called it “a commonsense approach that people across the political spectrum support. In fact,” she added, “the only opposition for all these years has been from big drug companies.”
That, and Tom Kean Jr. He railed against that sensible law, parroting Big Pharma’s line that allowing Medicare to negotiate is akin to “price controls” and would destroy 58,000 Pharma jobs in New Jersey – a claim that he never provided a scrap of evidence for, and now won’t discuss.
No wonder. The Pharma industry titans who railed against the price negotiation law are now assuring their stockholders that it won’t meaningfully affect their bottom line, as The Hill reported.
Yet the Republican leadership that Kean voted for, and the folks behind Project 2025, are calling to repeal that law if they regain power, which of course is what Big Pharma wants.
Kean would no doubt go right along with that too – subjecting millions of seniors to higher drug costs, higher out-of-pocket expenses, and higher costs for insulin.
“They could be facing out-of-pocket costs of over $10,000 a year for some drugs that Medicare covers,” Juliette Cubanski, an expert on Medicare policy with KFF, warned last week. “Many seniors won’t be able to afford their medications at all, because most live on relatively low incomes.”
And it’s not just your grandma who will overpay. If Medicare is no longer able to negotiate, the government would have to pay an extra $200 billion over a 10-year period, KFF estimates. That’s a lot of money. For perspective, it would be enough to restore the bulk of the state and local tax deduction known as SALT. Or to expand Medicare coverage to include hearing and dental aid. Kean wants to give that money to Big Pharma instead.
He argues that Medicare needs to overpay so these companies can fund research for new drugs, and that negotiating down the high prices would doom us all. “We are right now in COVID, voting to destroy the pharmaceutical industry would be like in World War II, voting to destroy the tank factory,” he declared at a debate in 2020.
That’s Big Pharma’s line, anyway. But the truth is that most of the basic research on drugs is financed by the federal government, with grants to universities and other research centers. In 2018, small firms mostly funded by the government and philanthropies accounted for nearly two-thirds of the new drugs patented in the U.S. and nearly three-quarters of drugs in late development, according to the Harvard Business Review.
That’s where the technology underlying the life-saving Moderna and Pfizer vaccines for COVID came from. And lest we forget, when House Republicans tried to slash billions from the government’s budget for this kind of medical research, Kean went right along with it without a peep. What would happen to Kean’s tank factory then?
And let’s get real: Big Pharma doesn’t spend all its revenue on research. It pays its top executives extravagantly, with Johnson & Johnson’s CEO, Joaquin Duato, earning more than $28 million last year. It spends tens of billions on marketing annually and more than $150 million a year on lobbying and political contributions.
Every other advanced country negotiates for lower prices and is paying less than we are for the same drugs. Then, what drug companies do is put the extra cost on Americans. Why should we have to carry that burden?
“This is all nonsense,” says Rep. Frank Pallone, D-6th, the chief author of the provision to negotiate drug prices. “It’s just Tom Kean going along with what the Republican leadership wants.”
He’ll no doubt do the same when they try to sabotage the Affordable Care Act, says Pallone, a primary architect of that law too. House Republicans have vowed to get rid of all the subsidies that make its coverage affordable, which are up for reauthorization next year. Millions could lose their health care altogether.
Even as a state legislator, Kean’s record is revealing: He voted against three bills passed by our state to strengthen the protections in the Affordable Care Act that ended up saving consumers big time. In 2019, thanks to these bills he opposed, health premiums on New Jersey’s individual market actually dropped by 9 percent.
So, no matter what he claims, Kean isn’t a cost-cutter on drugs, or on health care. If you care about making both more affordable, vote for his opponent, Sue Altman.
As a state senator, Kean even voted against putting $11 million into a state-funded program that helps seniors afford their prescription drugs. And like Donald Trump, when given a chance to actually support the idea of negotiating down drug prices, Kean refused to do it – instead leading the charge against the reform. So don’t be fooled. He’ll put his Pharma backers first.
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