The Biden Administration Is Letting Big Pharma Profiteer Off a Cancer Drug
Under existing law, Joe Biden and his health secretary have the power to lower the price of medicines developed with taxpayer funds. They’re refusing to do so for the $180,000-a-year cancer drug Xtandi — after a furious lobbying campaign by Big Pharma.
President Joe Biden delivers remarks at the White House Conservation In Action Summit at the US Interior Department on March 21, 2023, in Washington, DC. (Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images)
In the summer of 2020, then California attorney general Xavier Becerra demanded Donald Trump’s administration use existing law to lower the price of medicines that were originally developed at taxpayer expense.
“We cannot afford to leave the supply of this critical medication to chance and the whims of the marketplace when it was funded in part by taxpayer dollars,” Becerra wrote in a letter to the Trump administration in response to the high price of Remdesivir, which treats COVID-19.
Less than three years later, the agency run by Becerra — now Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary in the Biden administration — just rejected the same demand from two cancer patients unable to afford the $180,000-a-year price of a medicine whose development was originally funded by the public.
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