inquiry. the republican resistance to a baseless impeachment push. they just continue to take orders from donald trump, their puppetmaster-in-chief. a decade-long promise from democrats finally came to fruition in the white house. let medicare negotiate for lower prices. give medicare the authority to negotiate for lower prices. after decades of taking on big pharma, we finally won. when all in starts, right now. good evening fromâ new york. i m chris hayes. there have been a ton of developments in the donald trump indicted universe today, including a new filing in fulton county regarding whether or not that trial for all 19 defendants begins in october. we are in the midst of a veritable traffic jam of trump trials, a situation that once
i think you have to tell the pharmaceutical companies, they can t keep raising drug prices at three times the rate of inflation. medicare will start bargaining on behalf of seniors, and make them bring the prices down. we ll negotiate with the drug companies, for the cheapest available price on drugs. medicare should be able to negotiate for lower prices for its members. there are certain democratic campaign pledges that almost perennial, to the degree they ve been there for most of my adult career covering politics. one of them was, as you saw, to let medicare negotiate prescription drug prices. massively popular, consistently polling through the roof. it would both say of the government a ton of money, and make drugs cheaper for millions and millions of americans rely on them. the only big opposition to it was from big pharma, which wanted to keep prices as high as possible.
absolutely. in fact, medicare negotiates prices for everything else. hospital payments. doctors payments. it s really only because pharma got a sweetheart deal carve out, decades ago. that medicare has not been able to negotiate drug prices until the inflation reduction act. that s why today is so historic. this thing with health care advocates, many people who ve been working in this field for decades have advocated, for it s finally coming to fruit. let me ask you a timeline question, as a veteran of the affordable care act battles, famously, the affordable care act was pulled very poorly. pulled very well before it started being debated, pulled poorly by the time is being passed. it continued to pull very poorly in the first year or two. and then they tried to repeal it twice, they couldn t do it. because a very popular, very popular now. partly, there s a bunch of reasons for that. partly, delayed implementation. so, people don t get to see what the law was, and the
first time in history. in the first ten drugs were announced today. you know, i should point out, these are just the first ten drugs. there will be 50 next, year 50 after that. and then 20 a year going forward. so, this is a historic day, but it is really just the beginning of ensuring that medicare negotiate lower prices for seniors. ultimately, more and more americans see lower prices. i wanna put on the screen, the first ten, drugs which are selected. i should note, the timeline, here negotiations start now. they re gonna try to negotiate and hammer out these prices, it will be awhile until we get the new negotiated price. you, see everything from diabetes, to heart failure, to arthritis. one drew a imbruvica for blood cancer. a drug for crohn s. what is the process here? how does this work? well, essentially, the law
and their dog at opposition, over decades, is why this really popular, sensible proposal, was blocked. yet, today, that air is over. president biden announcing, in a program that is part of the inflation reduction act, the names of the first ten drugs that will be subject to price negotiations with medicare. eric tanden serves a domestic policy adviser, and she joins me now. it s great to have, you have been a democratic policy circles for a while and i ve been around this issue. so, there is something almost surreal about seeing that event today. this is a thing that is happening. yeah, i feel a little like i was aging with the videos. i worked on some of those campaigns over many years where we had leader after leader advocate for drugs being negotiate by medicare, very common sense proposal, but i m really proud that joe biden and democrats in the last congress got together and made history, i think, in really being able to deliver that medicare will negotiate drug prices for th