KHN’s ‘What The Health?’: Cue The Drug Price Debate


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The Republican and Democratic leaders of the Senate Finance Committee this week unveiled a sweeping proposal that seeks to lower prescription drug prices for the Medicare and Medicaid programs. The bill promptly drew opposition from the powerful pharmaceutical industry. But both parties seem set on trying to pass a drug price bill in advance of the 2020 elections.

Meanwhile, the bipartisan leaders of the other Senate committee that oversees prescription drugs announced that their bill would not come to the Senate floor before the chamber’s summer recess, meaning the earliest the full Senate would take up any drug pricing issues is this fall.

This week’s panelists are Julie Rovner from Kaiser Health News, Paige Winfield Cunningham of The Washington Post, Rebecca Adams of CQ Roll Call and Alice Miranda Ollstein of Politico.

Among the takeaways from this week’s podcast:

Also, Rovner interviews KHN’s Jenny Gold, who wrote the latest KHN-NPR “Bill of the Month” feature about the high cost of kidney dialysis. If you have an outrageous medical bill you’d like to share with us, you can do that here.

Plus, for extra credit, the panelists recommend their favorite health policy stories of the week they think you should read too:

Julie Rovner: The Los Angeles Times’ “Rising Health Insurance Deductibles Fuel Middle-Class Anger and Resentment,” by Noam Levey

Alice Miranda Ollstein: The New York Times’ “Neil Armstrong’s Death, and a Stormy, Secret $6 Million Settlement,” by Scott Shane and Sarah Kliff

Rebecca Adams: ProPublica’s “Health Insurers Make It Easy for Scammers to Steal Millions. Who Pays? You.” By Marshall Allen

Paige Winfield Cunningham: The New York Times’ “Politicians Tackle Surprise Bills, but Not the Biggest Source of Them: Ambulances,” by Sarah Kliff and Margot Sanger-Katz

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This story was produced by Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation.

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