Harris is ‘buying down premiums to buy votes’

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced in September that it would be reducing certain Medicare prescription drug premiums in what experts who spoke to the Daily Caller News Foundation called a ploy to buy votes before the November election.

Enrollees in the Medicare Part D prescription drug benefit are slated to have lower average monthly premiums for their pharmaceutical drugs next year due to the Biden-Harris administration pouring billions into subsidies for insurers, with premiums set to fall $7.45 from $53.95 in 2024 to $46.50 in 2025, according to a CMS press release. The move by the Biden-Harris administration is a political bribe aimed at securing the votes of Americans aged 65 and over who have the highest voter turnout historically, experts told the DCNF.

“The $2,000 dollar cap [on Medicare out-of-pocket prescription drug costs] as well as other Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) provisions were slated to triple the cost of Part D,” Michael Cannon, director of health policy studies at the Cato Institute, told the DCNF. “If millions of senior citizens see their premiums triple, they’d go to the polls and vote out those responsible. The Biden administration wanted to avert that.”

Today, Chairman @RepArrington, @ChuckGrassley, @MikeCrapo, @CathyMcMorris, and @RepJasonSmith sent a letter to @USCBO requesting a full budgetary analysis of @CMSGov’s plan for a new Medicare Part D Premium Stabilization Demonstration program that invites an unchecked…

— House Budget GOP (@housebudgetGOP) August 26, 2024

Premiums were slated to rise in 2025, largely due to a $2,000 cap on Medicare out-of-pocket prescription drug costs enacted as part of provisions in President Joe Biden’s IRA that go into effect next year. To stave off the increase, the White House set up a “stabilization” demonstration program for 2025 that will offer Medicare Part D insurers $15 dollars a month per enrollee in exchange for keeping premiums roughly stable, an initiative that is estimated to cost taxpayers $5 billion in 2025.

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“This is absolutely political,” Joel White, founder and CEO of healthcare consulting firm Horizon Government Affairs, told the DCNF. “They are buying down premiums to buy votes.”

Senior citizens have had the highest voter turnout of any demographic in every presidential election since 1996, with nearly 80% of adults 60 and over voting in 2020. The U.S. population of senior citizens is also growing faster than any other age group, and four key swing states — Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Arizona — rank top 20 in the share of their population aged 65 and over.

“[Democrats] are not lowering premiums. They’re hiding premiums,” Cannon told the DCNF. “This ‘demonstration project’ is merely a vehicle for channeling $5 billion to Medicare Part D insurers in order to keep the amount enrollees have to pay toward their premiums below what it is this year. The White House isn’t lowering premiums by lowering costs, they are doing it by passing the cost on to taxpayers rather than enrollees … That has been Democratic healthcare policy going all the way back to the [Harry] Truman administration: hide the cost of healthcare by shipping it to taxpayers.”

The Biden-Harris administration issued a press release Monday touting its record on prescription drug costs, saying, “While Big Pharma made record profits, Americans footed the bill for the industry’s price hikes. Not anymore. Thanks to my Inflation Reduction Act.” Meanwhile, Vice President Kamala Harris’ “New Way Forward” economic plan stated that, “Harris, along with President Biden, took on Big Pharma and won.”

“The demo[nstration program] is a band-aid that does not address the underlying wound — the IRA radically rewrote the law in ways that fundamentally destabilize the market,” White told the DCNF.

The Biden-Harris administration has taken a number of actions aimed at reducing drug prices, including proposing new guidelines in 2023 that would give it the power to seize patents from drug companies, so long as the protected products’ prices are considered too high and have received funding from the federal government.

The CMS announcement comes roughly four years after Democratic lawmakers and the press attacked former President Donald Trump’s September 2020 proposal to provide $200 discount cards for prescription drugs to 33 million seniors, with The New York Times describing it as an “election-eve promise with dubious legal authority” and Democratic New Jersey Rep. Frank Pallone calling the move a “blatant political gambit.”

“It’s all pretty transparently crooked, and yet you have The New York Times praising this sham demonstration program,” Cannon told the DCNF. “This initiative is fundamentally anti-democratic and unconstitutional.”

“The sudden decision is an attempt to curry favor with this, particularly, massive, voting bloc,” Peter Earle, senior economist at the American Institute for Economic Research, told the DCNF. “Repeated efforts to eliminate or reduce student loan debt and the huge gift to climate activists dubbed the ‘Inflation Reduction Act’ are other, earlier instances of the same type of conduct… Politically motivated redistribution is a mainstay of Washington, D.C., of course, but as both the debt and deficits of the Biden administration testify, it has escalated dramatically over the past four years.”

The White House and the Harris campaign did not respond to a request for comment from the DCNF.

This story originally was published by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

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