Credit: Bill Clark / CQ Roll Call
The U.S.’s largest lobbying group, the conservative U.S. Chamber of Commerce, has become the second prominent group to file a lawsuit to stop a plan for Medicare to be able to negotiate the prices for a handful of drugs, joining pharma giant Merck in alleging that the plan is unconstitutional.
The group announced in a statement on Friday that it is filing a lawsuit against Health and Human Services, the agency that administers Medicare, putting forth a dubious, Big Pharma-backed argument that allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices is tantamount to “price controls” — an argument that health experts have debunked. They say in their press release that allowing patients to access lower prices would “harm patients” and “limit access to medicine.”
The lawsuit argues that the plan, as put in place under the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), violates the separation of powers. Similarly to Merck’s lawsuit, it also argues that the plan violates the First and Fifth Amendments; […]
Think about this – we have an entire industry which has become so used to incredible profits ( often based upon publicly funded research and protected by patent law ) that it sues the government from even negotiating prices. That is the functional definition of entitlement.