Democrats have struggled to make voters aware of the impending — but not yet realized — benefits of the price negotiations. The lack of public awareness is a challenge for vulnerable Democrats planning to run on the party’s most significant health-care legislation in more than a decade….
Diamond and Roubein cite a May poll by KFF, formerly known as the Kaiser Family Foundation, that showed only about one-third of voters knew there was a law that allowed Medicare to negotiate drug-price discounts. It’s now Harris’s task to raise awareness of this achievement.
As I write this, Harris and President Joe Biden are expected to talk up the price discounts at a joint appearance Thursday afternoon. But as I argued in my print piece, health care policy mustn’t be thought of as something distinct from economic policy; it pretty much is economic policy. That’s because high prices limit access to health care; because health care is the nation’s largest industry sector; and because, apart from the defense industry (which is much smaller), health care is the industry sector over which the federal government exercises the most control. Polls show that voters are well aware that Trump and the Republicans have an inferior record on health care—the truth is they have practically no record at all, unless you count Trump’s deadly mismanagement of the Covid crisis.
Negotiated Medicare drug prices should be a central point not only in Harris’s Friday speech on economic policy, but in all her discussion of economic policy going forward. In fact, it wouldn’t be a bad idea for her to mention it in every speech. It is, as Biden would say, a big fucking deal.
