Biden's Band-Aid Sampler Pack

Joe Biden's poll numbers are still in the tank despite the carefully-timed cascade of criminal indictments against Donald Trump. Therefore, the White House has decided to do something really radical. They will announce the 10 lucky winners of the Medicare price negotiation sweepstakes even earlier than originally planned! 

Come Tuesday, tens of millions of Americans going broke because of the high cost of prescription drugs - or, more accurately, the tens of millions of Americans who have forgone the drugs because their cash already has run out - will finally discover whether their particular medication will be somewhat more affordable, beginning as early as 2026.  Since older Americans vote in far higher numbers than younger people do, the Lucky Ten probably will be treatments for diseases that inordinately affect the elderly.

Tuesday's desperate campaign stunt highlighting Biden's drug band-aids of the future has more than a few catches.  His team should know they're in trouble when even one of their most reliable New York Times centrist stenographers -  David Leonhardt - can make  only a wishy-washy case for them. Leonhardt and co-writer Ian Prasad Philbrick have made a feeble try anyway, even awarding Biden with the title "Doctor Spend Less" as a way both to cement his deficit hawk cred and to make voters forget that during his first campaign, he'd promised to push for a public health insurance option - the standard centrist bait and switch for a true single payer system. That promise was dead in the water by inauguration day.

The Times starts out with a handy, damning chart showing that health care costs in the United States are more than double those of other advanced countries. They then pitch the half-hearted hope that readers will conclude that eventually lowering the prices for only 10 drugs will make even the slightest dent in American health care costs.

It turns out that there are limits to even what media stenographers for the Democratic Party are willing to do, as they ruefully admit that lowering drug costs for older people will probably incentivize the rapacious drug companies to  raise the prices of these same 10 drugs for people under age 65. (Not to mention raising the prices of the thousands of drugs not in the Lucky 10 for patients of all ages. 

These unlucky patients would, of course, include some of the same younger people who will have to start repaying their onerous student loans next month. These are some of the same younger people who turned out to vote for Joe Biden in 2020, based solely upon his promise to at least partially forgive student debt for everybody, with no need to jump through the endless hoops of "means-testing."

Now, this is not to say that Joe Biden is ignoring younger people or worse, completely throwing them to the wolves.  Far from it. You see, the president sent out his good friend Bernie Sanders to New Hampshire and the cable talk shows over the weekend to warn progressive people of all ages that a vote for a primary challenger or for a certain Green Party candidate will be a vote for Donald Trump, No matter that these same disaffected souls would just stay home if there was no alternative to either Trump or Biden. Sanders just repeated the spoiler canard. Failing to pull the lever for Biden would be ushering in a new era of fascism and the complete privatization of Social Security and Medicare. It would rob all the uninsured student debtors of their last best vestige of hope of actually living to 65. It would also end Bernie's task of continuing to ineffectually urge Biden to do more progressive things, such as "going after corporations."

But back to the New York Times's even worse than half-hearted defense of Doctor Spend-less's Sampler Pack.

"Some people will save a lot of money," the article quotes one health researcher as hoping. The people who will save are the tiny minority of seniors who actually still have the retirement savings to spend on their drugs.

 But nevertheless, the Times persists in denying reality. Or maybe they're just being cynical when they write of the futuristic Medicare Drug Discount bonanza coming soon to a dystopian hellscape near you:

Biden and his aides understand that these policies are popular with swing voters, who, as this newsletter has described before, tend to lean left on economic issues while being more conservative on many social issues. That’s particularly true of swing voters who don’t have a four-year college degree. The president has described his health care policies as part of “Bidenomics in action.”

There's some occult snobbery built into that last paragraph. It implies that young "swing voters who don't have a four-year college degree" are so stupid as to believe that lowering the prices of only 10 drugs for the 65+ crowd is pretty much equal to Medicare For All . Maybe these voters will also forget that even during his first run for the White House, Biden had vowed to veto M4A if by some miracle it ever reached his desk after passing both houses of congress. Team Biden knows full well that polls show that at least 70 percent of Republican voters also favor single payer health insurance. 

About those older voters: Thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, they are now able to buy their hearing aids over the counter, the better to hear Biden reading off the telerompter to tout Bidenomics.

He is also, according to the Times. "trying" to enforce the Trump-era bipartisan law that prevents health care private equity vultures from sending out surprise bills to patients. It seems that the usual loopholes preventing enforcement were written into the legislation by the lobbyists working for private equity surprise-billers.

Now, in case you are thoroughly discouraged if not downright jaded by the Big Ten Sweepstakes, here are some consolations courtesy of Times:

--Five of the major predatory drug companies are still headquartered right here in the USA. Your drugs might be manufactured off-shore in low-wage sweatshops, but the CEOs still occupy their Wall Street corner offices. America is already great.

--Drug companies say lower prices on 10 drugs will hamper innovation. They are lying! They will keep re-patenting old drugs for fun and profit. It's the American way.

-- Nobody really knows yet whether the drug savings for older people will translate to higher costs for younger people. You'll just have to wait until after the 2026 band-aid reform package slowly goes into effect to find out. The election is in 2024, so what nobody knows yet cannot possibly hurt Biden you yet.

-- Perhaps most important of all, soothes the Times,

• Biden has suggested that if he wins re-election, he will try to take more steps to reduce medical costs. Among them: making Obamacare subsidies permanent and capping insulin costs for privately insured Americans. “There’s more to do,” he has said.