News

Biden accused of playing politics by freezing Trump-era order reducing insulin costs

January 23, 2021 | | Print Article

Get the latest BPR news delivered free to your inbox daily. SIGN UP HERE

CHECK OUT WeThePeople.store for best SWAG!

Within hours of stepping into office, newly inaugurated President Joe Biden froze a Trump era executive order that had been designed to lower the price of insulin.

“[T]his action temporarily delays for 60 days from the date of the memorandum the effective date of the final rule titled ‘Implementation of Executive Order on Access to Affordable Life-saving Medications,'” Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services announced via the Federal Register.

Note the name of the Trump-era rule.

Instituted last month, the rule mandated that community health centers which benefit from federal grants “establish practices to provide access to insulin and injectable epinephrine to low-income health center patients at the price the health center purchased these two drugs.”

Versus at a marked-up — or, allegedly, marked-down — price.

The rule’s freeze — which, to be clear, might conceivably be reversed once the delay period ends on March 22nd — has triggered anger from Americans, some of them doctors, who feel as if Biden is sticking it to those with diabetes for partisan reasons.

Look:

Included among the critics are diabetes patients, including some that don’t even care for former President Donald Trump.

Observe:

So why has the Biden administration frozen the policy? That’s where things get murky.

First, the administration has frozen every Trump administration healthcare policy that’s raised “fact, law, or policy” concerns, according to Business Insider.

Second, ever since the rule was signed into law last summer, the National Association of Community Health Centers and other groups have been issuing statements claiming its implementation would do more harm than good.

“The National Association of Community Health Centers (NACHC), state primary care associations, and local federally qualified health centers (FQHCs) have submitted comments urging the Trump administration not to implement a ‘misguided’ executive order taking away their 340B program savings on insulin and epinephrine autoinjectors,” journalist and publisher Ted Slafsky’s 340B Report reported in October.

These parties have claimed that the Trump administration’s rule is based on a “fundamental misunderstanding” of how the federal government’s 340B drug pricing program works.

The rule specifically “conditions health centers future federal grants on making insulin products and epinephrine auto-injectors available to low-income, uninsured, or under-insured patients at the reduced price FQHCs pay for the products under the 340B program,” according to 340B.

The problem, or so claim the rule’s critics claim, is that the rule would force them to charge the exact price they pay, even when the price they pay is higher than the price they’re currently charging.

“For example, the 340B price for inhaled insulin is hundreds of dollars. Health centers currently discount this price for their low-income patients, but would be prohibited from doing so under the EO,” the NACHC claimed in comments filed with the Trump administration back in October.

View the association’s full comments below:

NACHC comments on Trump era… by V Saxena

The Biden administration believes the NACHC and its allies have a point, and so the delay in the rule’s implementation will allow officials to review the fine print for themselves and determine whether this point is indeed valid or just nonsense.

The NACHC has for its part added that, while it’d prefer that the rule be nixed, if in case it is maintained, it should at least be rewritten to prevent the problems that it highlighted in the comments it’d issued last October.

DONATE TO BIZPAC REVIEW

Please help us! If you are fed up with letting radical big tech execs, phony fact-checkers, tyrannical liberals and a lying mainstream media have unprecedented power over your news please consider making a donation to BPR to help us fight them. Now is the time. Truth has never been more critical!

$10
$15
$25
$50
Other
$
Success! Thank you for donating. Please share BPR content to help combat the lies.
Vivek Saxena
Latest posts by Vivek Saxena (see all)

Comment

We have no tolerance for comments containing violence, racism, profanity, vulgarity, doxing, or discourteous behavior. If a comment is spam, instead of replying to it please click the ∨ icon below and to the right of that comment. Thank you for partnering with us to maintain fruitful conversation.

PLEASE JOIN OUR NEW COMMENT SYSTEM! We love hearing from our readers and invite you to join us for feedback and great conversation. If you've commented with us before, we'll need you to re-input your email address for this. The public will not see it and we do not share it.

Latest Articles