Did Biden and the Democrats Just Ruin Our Chance at Curing Cancer?
President Joe Biden’s move to put a cap on drug prices may have ruined the country’s chance of discovering a cure for cancer in the next 25 years.
Sally C. Pipes, a health care policy expert and president of the Pacific Research Institute, explained as much in a Feb. 8 article for Forbes.
The article was written in response to Biden’s State of the Union address given the night before.
During his speech, Biden touted a provision of the recently passed Inflation Reduction Act which essentially put a cap on the price of certain prescription drugs.
“Too many of you lay in bed at night staring at the ceiling, wondering what will happen if your spouse gets cancer, your child gets sick, or if something happens to you,” Biden said.
“Will you have the money to pay your medical bills? Will you have to sell the house?”
“I get it. With the Inflation Reduction Act that I signed into law, we’re taking on powerful interests to bring your health care costs down so you can sleep better at night.”
According to Pipes, not only will this policy fail to save Americans any money at the pharmacy counter, it will also cause the cancellation of research and development into new cures and therapies for diseases such as cancer.
(The following quote and subsequent information was included in an exclusive report for The Western Journal’s subscribers. The report investigated claims made during Biden’s State of the Union address and found that many promises to lower day-to-day costs for Americans will actually result in the opposite. Consider subscribing to The Western Journal to see more content like this).
When asked her opinion of the health care provision touted by Biden, Pipes told The Western Journal it was a “[d]disaster for patients and expensive.”
In her article for Forbes, Pipes laid out the plan’s direct costs.
In 2016, as vice president, Biden led the “Cancer Moonshot,” with the goal of cutting all cancer deaths by at least 25 percent over the next 25 years.
That plan is now no longer tenable according to Pipes all because of Biden’s insistence on attacking pharmaceutical companies for their supposed greed.
In his State of the Union address, Biden took the time to point out that pharmaceutical companies made billions in profits during COVID. That is true.
What the president left out of this speech, however, was the fact that research and development of new drugs and cures (which America reportedly does better than any other country) also costs billions of dollars.
“The price caps in the [Inflation Reduction Act] reflect an embarrassing naïveté about the economics of drug research and development. The cost of bringing a new drug to market can be as high as $2.8 billion,” Pipes wrote.
“That price tag is so high because drug research is risky. More than 90% of drugs that enter clinical trials fail …”
“Investors are willing to gamble on research that has a roughly 10% success rate because the potential payoff from developing an effective therapy can be huge. The [Inflation Reduction Act] is intent on taking those paydays away. And in so doing, it’s virtually guaranteeing that patients now, and in the future, will have access to fewer innovative, effective, and perhaps even curative therapies.”
Now, thanks to the act’s health care provisions, companies such as Novartis and Alnylam are already scrapping their various research and development projects.
“Price controls reduce the supply of goods and services in the short term —and in the long term. The IRA’s price controls will be no different. Unfortunately, many of their worst effects will be felt by patients long after Biden has left office — and long after his Cancer Moonshot has petered out,” Pipes wrote.
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