For the first time, Medicare is able to directly negotiate the prices of prescription drugs due to President Biden’s prescription drug law, the Inflation Reduction Act. Today, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Administrator Chiquita Brooks-LaSure issued the following statement on the announcement that the drug companies that manufacture all 10 drugs selected for the Medicare Drug Price Negotiation Program for the first cycle have chosen to participate in the Negotiation Program. The negotiations with participating drug companies for the selected drugs will occur in 2023 and 2024 with the negotiated prices effective beginning in 2026.
President Biden's nominee to run the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has been a hotly-debated topic among healthcare wonks for a couple of months now. He announced that he was picking California Attorney General Xavier Becerra as his HHS Secretary back in early December, but who would be running CMS (basically the 2nd most-powerful position within the HHS Dept.) has been a big unknown until a few days ago, when Dan Diamond and Amy Goldstein of the Washington Post scooped the story.
I admit to never having heard of her until her name was mentioned as a possible contender in a few articles last month, but if confirmed, I'll probably be mentioning her name fairly often over the next few years (likely even more frequently than Becerras), so I figured I should post a quick profile of her today.
