On August 29, the Biden administration announced the list of ten drugs over whose price Medicare would, for the first time, negotiate, under new authority granted by the Inflation Reduction Act last year. According to the government, people on Medicare who took the ten drugs paid a total of $3.4 billion in out-of-pocket costs in 2022 alone, while the cost to Medicare totaled $50 billion.

The new prices will be announced by September of 2024, but will not take effect until 2026. In his announcement, Biden declared, “We’re going to keep standing up to Big Pharma and we’re not going to back down.” The new rhetoric stands in stark contrast to the Obama administration’s more indulgent stance toward the pharmaceutical industry. Fearing the industry’s formidable lobbying clout, the administration’s signature health care reform, the Affordable Care Act, left the powerful pharmaceutical industry completely unscathed. Unsurprisingly, pharmaceutical costs have become the fastest-growing component of health care costs in the ensuing years.

Big Pharma, unsurprisingly, is fighting against the Biden administration’s efforts, launching lawsuits to block the new rules. Meanwhile, writers at the Economist — also unsurprisingly — have come to the aid of Big Pharma in its hour of need. While conceding that Americans do spend too much on drugs, the “newspaper” nonetheless complains that the new “heavy handed” rules “have swung from one extreme to the other.”