Powerful Democrat, Republican Find Common Ground With Bill To Force Drug Companies To Play By Medicaid’s Rules
Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) will be the top Republican and Democrat on the influential Senate Finance Committee next year. Their bipartisan bill would give HHS more power to recoup the full amount lost if companies misclassify their drugs under the Medicaid program. Experts watching Congress have predicted that drug prices might be a problem where the parties will work together.
The Hill:
Bipartisan Senators Introduce New Drug Pricing Bill
A bill introduced by Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) will seek to crack down on the tactics used by drug companies like Mylan to overcharge taxpayers for Medicaid rebates. The bipartisan bill from the incoming chairman and ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee could be a sign the two will seek common ground on drug prices. (Weixel, 12/4)
In other national health care news —
The Associated Press:
Freshman Democrats In Congress Ready To Use New-Won Power
Incoming members of the Democratic Party's new U.S. House majority say they're ready to turn the energy of their campaigns into real power on Capitol Hill. Rep.-elects Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and a handful of other liberal-leaning incoming Democrats used an orientation event for freshman lawmakers Tuesday sponsored by the Harvard Kennedy School's Institute of Politics to stake out some of their top issues — from gun violence to health care to climate change. (12/4)
CQ:
Pro-Choice Caucus Preps For Democratic Majority
An influential House caucus hopes to use the Democrats’ majority next year to counteract Republican efforts to restrict abortion and family planning, although the group still faces an uphill battle against a Republican Senate and administration with strong ties to the anti-abortion lobby. The Pro-Choice Caucus has been recently overshadowed by its conservative rival, the Bipartisan Congressional Pro-Life Caucus, which counts Republican leadership and lawmakers from the influential Freedom Caucus among its members. (Raman, 12/5)
The Washington Post:
Trump Administration Threatens Future Of HIV Research Hub
The Trump administration has thrown into doubt a multimillion-dollar research contract to test new treatments for HIV that relies on fetal tissue — work targeted by antiabortion lawmakers and social conservatives aligned with the president. The turmoil over the National Institutes of Health contract with the University of California at San Francisco is part of a building battle between conservatives opposed to research using fetal tissue and scientists who say the material is vital to developing new therapies for diseases from AIDS to Parkinson’s. (Goldstein, 12/4)
Stat:
'CRISPR Babies' Experiment More Flawed Than Scientists First Realized
When He Jiankui unveiled data last week on the two baby girls born from embryos whose genes he had edited with CRISPR-Cas9 — the world’s first “CRISPR babies” — his 59 slides flew by in a 20-minute blur, leaving scientists in the audience of the International Summit on Human Genome Editing desperately taking iPhone pictures for later scrutiny. Now many of them, as well as researchers who watched the webcast of the Hong Kong summit, have had time to analyze the data. The verdict: What He did is way worse than initially realized. (Begley, 12/5)
The Associated Press:
More US Beef Being Recalled Over Salmonella Fears
An Arizona company is expanding the scope of its recall of raw beef that could be contaminated with salmonella, federal officials said Tuesday. The U.S. Department of Agriculture said in a news release that a unit of Brazil's JBS is now recalling a total of more than 12 million pounds (5.44 million kilograms) of raw beef that was shipped around the U.S. According to officials, information obtained in three additional cases of sickened patients led to the identification of other ground beef products that weren't part of the initial recall. (12/4)