March 15 (UPI) — President Joe Biden travels to Nevada on Wednesday to tout his plan to decrease prescription drug prices forward of recent federal rebates.
In a well-known chorus, Biden is anticipated to name for increasing Medicare’s authority to barter out-of-pocket drug prices, together with a $2 month-to-month cap on sure generic medication used to deal with power circumstances and a $35 worth cap on insulin, the White Home stated.
The plan additionally permits without cost vaccines for Medicare recipients and reduces prices for behavioral and psychological well being providers.
Final week, Biden unveiled his 2024 federal funds proposal, which calls on Congress to increase Medicare and Social Safety and scale back the federal deficit by elevating taxes on rich People.
Financial savings from the Biden reforms would pour an extra $200 billion into Medicare’s Hospital Insurance coverage Belief Fund over the following decade and assist preserve the applications solvent for a minimum of the following 25 years, the White Home stated beforehand.
Biden’s plan would additionally add industrial well being insurers to a requirement that forces drug corporations to pay rebates to Medicare every time medication costs rise quicker than inflation.
Rebates for medication administered by physicians underneath Medicare Half B went into impact Jan. 1.
On Wednesday, the U.S. Division of Well being and Human Companies introduced the primary set of pharmaceuticals that can be topic to the rebates, which means a decrease co-pay — starting in April — for about 27 pharmaceuticals whose costs rose sharply within the last quarter of 2022.
By comparability, 1,200 pharmaceuticals elevated their costs quicker than inflation all through 2021 earlier than Biden’s insurance policies went into impact, the White Home stated.
Later this week, the Facilities for Medicare and Medicaid Companies will launch federal tips on how choose drug prices can be negotiated transferring ahead, setting the stage for Medicare to begin the bargaining later this yr.
The president’s go to to Nevada additionally comes amid new federal information that present the Inflation Discount Act has labored to deliver down general healthcare prices since being signed into legislation final August, the White Home stated.
The administration additionally launched a report claiming Biden’s Inflation Discount Act would have saved Medicare recipients about $234 million in out-of-pocket prices over the earlier yr.
In a single excessive instance of excessive prices, some People have been paying almost $200 for the shingles vaccine in 2021, Well being and Human Companies Secretary Xavier Becerra stated throughout a Tuesday press name to preview the president’s Nevada go to.
“Not anymore,” he stated, giving credit score to Biden’s prescription drug legislation.
Susan Rice, director of White Home home coverage, accused Republicans of desirous to intestine the well being applications to support Large Pharma.
“Congressional Republicans have launched laws to repeal the Inflation Discount Act,” she stated. “Which means thousands and thousands of People would pay larger medical insurance premiums and better taxes, thousands and thousands of People would pay larger drug costs and insulin costs and thousands and thousands of seniors can be unable to get beneficial vaccines without cost and billions of {dollars} would return into the pockets of Large Pharma, all whereas rising the deficit.”
A number of pharmaceutical corporations have heeded Biden’s name to decrease prices.
Earlier this month, Eli Lilly stated it was slicing the value of its insulin and capping the out-of-pocket value for the diabetes remedy at $35 per thirty days. On Tuesday, drugmaker Novo Nordisk introduced a plan to chop the value of its insulin by 75%.
Throughout much of last week’s Democratic National Convention, multiple observers commented on the convention’s aggressive appeals to independent voters and Trump-weary Republicans.
Those of you who subscribe to the Daily Current newsletter may recall the newsletter’s email subject line Tuesday morning was “Democrats to nation: We like you.”
By the end of the convention, the message out of Chicago had become “Democrats to nation: We are you.”
Well! Friday Donald Trump showed that he isn’t confined to just doubling down on his base and hoping/praying there’s more of them than of everyone else. No sirree. He wants everyone to know that he too can reach out – that he can expand his message beyond the MAGAfolk.
And to prove it, he welcomed the endorsement of … Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and his brain worm.
Kennedy, whose name evidently will still be on Nevada’s general election ballot whether he likes it or not, has spent more than a year running for president with a very simple message: “Look at me! I am a quack! But I am also a Kennedy! Celebrity and quackery! What could be more attractive to U.S. voters in the 2020s?” Except Kennedy phrased it differently.
It’s not as if Kennedy didn’t have a point.
Multiple high-profile careers, especially Trump’s, demonstrate that in the 21st century mediascape, quackery can be a hot sell.
Add a famous name and, to borrow Michele Obama’s phrase, “the affirmative action of generational wealth,” and something like Kennedy and his brain worm shooting across the political firmament was always inevitable, to the point of being banal.
(Kennedy has said Trump offered him a job in a Trump administration, a premise of hopefully no practical consequence but one that is amusing to speculate about. Trump didn’t confirm it, so was Kennedy spewing nonsense when he said Trump offered him a job? Or, if Trump did offer him a job, was Trump lying? Or, did Trump really say he’d give him a job, and meant it, but Kennedy can’t count on that because Trump has no sense of loyalty to or regard for anyone but himself? Each of those scenarios are plausible.)
The Kennedy noise aside, Trump’s more substantial attempt to reach voters beyond the fold of his cult is his pitch to tipped workers: vote for the authoritarian and women will never have control of their own bodies but at least tips won’t get taxed.
His “no tax on tips” event in Las Vegas Friday, a modest affair to begin with, sort of got short shrift in the news cycle, thanks to Kennedy and his brain worm.
Trump did say something interesting in Las Vegas though, something that appears to have gone unnoticed except by Nevada Current reporter Jen Solis: You know how Democrats have glommed on to the “no tax on tips” thing but also tried to leverage it into getting rid of the hideous federal subminimum wage by which people in some states can be paid as little as $2.13 an hour? Trump wants to make sure that employers get to keep paying the subminimum wage.
Nevada’s one of a handful of states that already outlawed the subminimum wage. But one likes to think Nevada workers care about their fellow service employees in other states.
Meanwhile, to reiterate, Trump’s no tax on tips pander, though petty policy, could be serious politically, for the same reason Nevada is the battleground state where Harris tends to poll the weakest: Nevada has spent pretty much the entire 21st century getting economically pummeled harder than any state in the country.
That understandably makes for an owly electorate.
The higher costs of groceries, insurance, energy, and rent that accompanied the emergence from the pandemic have hit Nevada households especially hard, because Nevada’s economic recovery from the pandemic (just like its recovery from the Great Recession) is largely a low-wage affair.
And Nevada workers suffer even more than most Americans from pandemic-driven rises in prices, because Nevada workers pay one of the nation’s highest sales tax rates when buying shoes, a sandwich for lunch, or a used car.
Granted:
-Occasional seemingly significant polling results notwithstanding, independent candidates almost always perform much more poorly in elections than they do in polls, and Kennedy’s candidacy was already disappearing before our very eyes.
-Democrats just concluded what was arguably the most successful televised makeover in the history of televising or makeovers.
-Trump’s schtick is old and boring.
And for the vast and overwhelming majority of Nevada workers, the benefit of eliminating the tax on tips would equal exactly jack doodley squat.
But the gimmick makes rhetorical contact with the issue that, according to polling anyway, will impact the election in Nevada more than any other, voters’ perception of the economy.
As Democrats repeatedly reminded everyone in Chicago, the election is going to be close.
Harris has a good shot at winning in Nevada.
Alas, so does Trump.
Tim Walz’s “we’ll sleep when we’re dead” thing should be taken especially seriously by Democrats in Nevada.
A version of this column was originally published in the Daily Current newsletter, which is free, and which you can subscribe to here.
A woman has died at the opening day of the Burning Man Festival, according to the Pershing County Sheriff’s Office.
On Sunday, August 25, around 11:37 a.m., Burning Man Emergency Dispatch reached out to the Pershing County Sheriff’s Office to report a potential death at the festival.
Officials arrived on scene are were able to confirm the death of a female festival-goer.
No official cause of death has been determined, and an investigation is underway.
The name of the deceased is being withheld until next of kin can be notified.
LAS VEGAS — An Oct. 8 trial date has been set for two Nevada men accused of damaging rock formations estimated to be 140 million years old at the Lake Mead National Recreation Area.
A federal indictment charged Wyatt Clifford Fain, 37, and Payden David Guy Cosper, 31, with one count of injury and depredation of government property and one count of aiding and abetting. The U.S. Department of Justice said the men could each face up to 10 years in prison if convicted.
The two Henderson residents were arrested by the U.S. Marshals Service and made their first court appearance Friday, at which they both pleaded innocent and were released on a personal recognizance bod, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported.
Authorities said Fain and Cosper allegedly pushed rock formations over a cliff edge around Redstone Dunes Trail at Lake Mead on April 7, resulting in damages of more than $1,000.
The Lake Mead National Recreation Area just outside of Las Vegas draws around 6 million visitors every year and spans 2,344 square miles (6,071 square kilometers) of mountains and desert canyons.
Authorities said staffing levels mean park officials often rely on the public to also keep watch over resources within park boundaries.
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