Medicare drug rebates are here and they're a damn big deal

Democrats are struggling to make voters aware of the impending — but not yet realized — benefits of price negotiations. The lack of public awareness is a challenge for vulnerable Democrats seeking to run on the party's most significant health care reform bill in more than a decade….

Diamond and Roubein cite a Survey in May by KFF, formerly known as the Kaiser Family Foundation, which showed that only about a third of voters knew there was a law allowing Medicare to negotiate drug price discounts. Now it's Harris' job to raise awareness of that achievement.

As I write, Harris and President Joe Biden are expected to tout the discounts in a joint appearance on Thursday afternoon. But as I argued in my print article, health policy cannot be viewed as separate from economic policy; it is fundamentally Is Economic policy. That's because high prices limit access to health care; because health care is the largest industry in the country; and because, aside from the defense industry (which is much smaller), health care is the industry over which the federal government has the most control. Polls show that voters are well aware that Trump and the Republicans have a poor record on health care—in fact, they have virtually no record at all, unless you count Trump's fatal mismanagement of the Covid crisis.

Negotiated Medicare drug prices should not only be a central point in Harris' speech on economic policy on Friday, but also in all their discussion about future economic policy. In fact, it would not be a bad idea if they did it in everyone Speech. It's, as Biden would say, a damn big deal.