If you watch television much, like most people, you’ve probably seen the latest ads about the “Biden Pill Penalty.” The ads are calling on Republicans and President Trump to fix the penalty. But what is it?

This all concerns the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) of 2022, a misnamed bill if there ever was one. It certainly did not reduce inflation, but it did do a lot of harm for seniors on Medicare.

The issue is price controls. I wrote about it in a previous post on 8/19/24 called Price Controls Means Fewer Drugs and Groceries. Here’s what I said about them then:

“It makes good political sense to tell seniors you’re going to lower the price of their prescription drugs. What you won’t tell them, however, is this same move will reduce the development of new medicines.”

The editors of The Wall Street Journal said this: “The IRA let Medicare “negotiate” prices for 10 to 20 drugs a year and a total of 60 by 2029. Negotiate is a euphemism for extortion: Drug makers that don’t participate or reject the government’s price face a daily excise tax that starts at 186% and climbs to 1,900% of a drug’s daily revenue.”

The law also requires manufacturers to pay the government rebates on medicines sold to Medicare if they raise prices more than the rate of inflation, and puts them on the hook for more of the entitlement’s Part D costs. Democrats used the resulting estimated “savings” of some $160 billion to pay for the green new deal.

WSJ says, “But subsidized solar panels won’t help if you get sick. The inevitable, albeit invisible, result of Democrats’ raid on pharmaceutical companies will be fewer new medicines.”

Thus, the term, “The Biden Pill Penalty.” The penalty is fewer new medicines for seniors whose declining health means they need those new medicines more than anyone.

Roche CEO Thomas Schinecker said last summer that “we have decided that we are not going to do certain trials, or that we are not going to do a merger or acquisition or licensing [deal] because it is becoming financially not viable.” Astra-Zeneca also warned that it might delay launching some cancer medicines because of the IRA.

Some 90% of drug candidates fail in clinical trials, and manufacturers sometimes never recoup their investment on even those that are approved. They use profits from their few commercial successes to finance research and development into new medicines and to compensate investors. The IRA threatens this risk-reward model.

Here is what the WSJ editors have to say about that:

“Fixing prices is a recipe for shortages, as controls would discourage grocery suppliers. Voilà, empty store shelves. Price controls have led to shortages everywhere they’ve been tried, from Moscow to Caracas. The last American President to impose wage and price controls was Richard Nixon in the early 1970s. He had to stage a humiliating retreat amid shortages and market dislocations, and prices immediately soared when controls were lifted.”

It’s time to undo the damage of the Biden Pill Penalty and get rid of price controls on prescription drugs. We need all the innovation possible to develop new drugs to keep us all living longer. Price controls only disincentivize the pharmaceutical companies from developing new drugs when we need them most.

For many years I took a baby aspirin every day to prevent heart attacks or a stroke. It was the recommendation for anyone over the age of fifty. But recently that has all changed.

Are you aware of this change? Jack Phillips, writing in The Epoch Times, tells us a new survey found that about half of U.S. adults are not aware that the decades-old consensus about taking one low-dose aspirin per day has changed.

For years, health officials and medical groups recommended that older Americans take one aspirin, a blood thinner, daily to stave off cardiovascular disease or stroke. Then, in 2019, the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology announced new guidelines about low-dose aspirin usage, reversing the prior guidelines and noting that taking one aspirin per day can lead to increased risks of gastrointestinal bleeding.

But the message seems to have been missed by about half of Americans. A survey released on Feb. 3 by the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center found that 48 percent of U.S. adults believe that for most people, the benefits of taking one low-dose aspirin each day to reduce the chance of stroke or heart attack outweigh the risks. More than 1,700 people participated in the survey.

Thirty-nine percent of those surveyed said they were not sure, while 13 percent said that the “risks are now thought to prevail over the benefits” under the new guidelines. “Habits backed by conventional wisdom and the past advice of health care providers are hard to break,” Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, who oversaw the survey, said in a statement on Feb 4. “Knowing whether taking a low-dose aspirin daily is advisable or not for you is vital health information.”

The survey also shed more light on why people may believe that low-dose aspirin’s benefits outweigh the risks. About 45 percent of respondents said that they or someone in their family had suffered a heart attack or stroke, compared with 49 percent who did not have a family history of heart attack or stroke.

People who have a personal history of heart attack or stroke have been told to take a low-dose daily aspirin, typically about 81 milligrams. The survey found that about 18 percent of people with no history of either health problem reported taking aspirin daily.

In 2019, the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association changed their guidelines on daily aspirin usage, stating that it should be taken only infrequently because older adults could be at an increased risk of developing internal bleeding. However, daily aspirin is still recommended for people who have a high risk of a heart attack or stroke.

An independent panel of health officials known as the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force made a similar recommendation in 2022, after it had suggested daily aspirin usage to combat heart attack or stroke. Health officials have said that aspirin irritates the lining of the stomach, triggering internal bleeding, ulcers, and gastrointestinal problems. Because it’s a blood thinner, aspirin also can be dangerous for people who are at a high risk of bleeding, according to officials.

Older adults without heart disease shouldn’t take daily low-dose aspirin to prevent a first heart attack or stroke, the preventive services group said at the time. Bleeding risks for adults in their 60s and older who haven’t had a heart attack or stroke outweigh any potential benefits from aspirin, it said.

A study published on June 25, 2024, in the Annals of Internal Medicine found that 18.5 million adults ages 60 and older with no history of cardiovascular disease reported taking preventive aspirin in 2021, the latest year for which data are available. Of that figure, 3.3 million reported taking daily aspirin without being directed to by a doctor or medical professional.

This is a perfect example of why we should never say, “The science is settled.” Science is never settled because our knowledge is always growing. We must always challenge our conventional wisdom because you never know when further knowledge will change our understanding and alter the best advice based on “our current scientific recommendations.”