Joel White was interview by the National Journal about what another Trump presidency could mean for the Inflation Reduction Act and it’s forced drug pricing negotiations.
Joel White, a Republican health care strategist, noted that the “Super Bowl” of tax policy is coming up, with Trump tax cuts and the enhanced Obamacare premium subsidies expiring at the end of 2025. White said the challenge for IRA repeal is that “it was a net reduction in spending in the Medicare program, and no one’s found a list of reforms that would fully replace the spending cuts.”
“The bigger Medicare picture is we don’t like the approach; we share the goal of lowering costs,” said White, president and CEO of Horizon Government Affairs. “How can we get something credible that could replace that or at least mitigate, really, the negative side effects of price controls?”
To deliver lower drug prices to patients more quickly, White suggested Trump could revisit a policy from his first term that would effectively eliminate rebates negotiated between pharmacy-benefit managers and drug manufacturers. The idea, he said, is that manufacturers would pass those savings to patients at the pharmacy counter.