Biden announces plan to cut prescription drug prices at joint event with Harris

At a joint rally with Vice President Kamala Harris in Maryland on Thursday, President Joe Biden announced an “effort to reduce extraordinarily high prescription drug prices.”

Referring to a retired registered nurse who introduced Biden and Harris and said she paid $9,000 last year for a prescription drug, Biden said: “Starting in January, for every prescription drug she has, including, God forbid, if she needs a very expensive drug, a regular cancer drug, the most she will have to pay is $2,000, period.”

“The drugs treat everything from heart failure, blood clots, kidney disease, arthritis, blood cancers, and more, and today I am proud to announce that Medicare has reached an agreement with all manufacturers on the 10 drugs selected in the first round of negotiations.
(that) lower prices for the 10 drugs will go into effect in January 2026,” Biden later added.

“We’re going to protect Medicare and Social Security, and make sure the wealthy pay their fair share,” he said. “That means making the tax code fairer. We’ve also announced measures to combat anti-competitive practices in health care.”

Harris, who spoke before Biden, touted her record in fighting Big Pharma and highlighted her tiebreaking Senate vote in favor of using Medicare to lower prescription drug prices.

Thursday marked the first joint event since Biden dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Harris for the Democratic nomination.

“We believe deeply that every senior in our country should be able to live with safety, stability and dignity. No senior in America should have to choose between filling their prescriptions or paying their rent,” Harris said. “That’s what we’re talking about today because we know that for far too long, far too many of our seniors have struggled to afford their medications and, as a result, are forced to spend their time trying to figure out how they’re going to fill a prescription like insulin based on a doctor’s prescription that’s meant to save their life, or whether they’re going to have to ration their pills to make it through a month.”

“For years, Big Pharma has consistently inflated the prices of life-saving drugs, often charging many times the cost of production just to increase their profits, and millions of Americans have suffered as a result,” she added.

“Throughout my career, I’ve worked to hold bad actors accountable and lower the cost of prescription drugs. As California’s attorney general, I took on drug companies for misleading marketing and illegally inflating drug prices, and we won billions of dollars,” she continued. “As a United States senator, I fought to pass laws that would make health care more affordable and accessible to all Americans. And as vice president, together with Joe Biden, our president, we finally addressed the longstanding problem that for years was one of the biggest challenges on this issue: that Medicare was legally prohibited from negotiating lower drug prices, and those costs were then passed on to our seniors. But that’s no longer the case.”

Harris also noted that two years ago, as vice president, I was proud to cast the deciding vote that sent the bill that gave Medicare negotiating authority to the president’s desk, and I was proud when our president, Joe Biden, signed that bill into law.