Biden announces plan to lower prescription drug prices in joint event with Harris

During a joint rally with Vice President Kamala Harris in Maryland on Thursday, President Joe Biden announced an "effort to lower the extraordinary high prescription drug prices."

Referring to a retired registered nurse who introduced Biden and Harris and said she paid $9,000 last year for a prescription drug, Biden said, "Beginning January, every single prescription drug she has, including, God forbid, if she needs a really expensive drug, regular cancer drug, maximum she ever has to pay is $2,000 period."

"Drugs treat from everything from heart failure, blood clots, kidney disease, arthritis, blood cancer, more and today, I'm proud to announce that Medicare has reached agreement with all manufacturers on all 10 drugs selected in the first round of negotiations 

[that] lower prices for all 10 drugs will go in effect in January of 2026," Biden later added.

"We're going to protect Medicare and Social Security, make sure the wealthy pay their fair share," he said. "By the way, that means making a tax code fair. Look, in addition, we also announced steps to crack down on anti-competitive practice in health care."

Harris, who spoke before Biden, touted her record fighting Big Pharma and highlighted her tie-breaking Senate vote to use Medicare to lower prescription drug prices.

Thursday marked first joint event since Biden dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Harris for the Democratic nomination.

"We believe deeply every senior in our nation should be able to live with security, stability and dignity, and so in the United States of America, no senior should have to choose between either filling their prescription or paying their rent," Harris said. "That's the subject of today, because we know for far too long, far too many of our seniors have struggled to afford their medication, and as a result, seniors have been forced to spend their time trying to figure out how they are going to be able to fill a prescription like insulin based on the doctor's prescription, which is about saving their life, or whether they'd have to ration their pills to be able to make it stretch through a month."

"For years, Big Pharma has often inflated the price of life saving medications, often charging many times what it would cost to make just to increase their profits, and millions of Americans have suffered as a result," she added.

"My entire career, I have worked to hold bad actors accountable and lower the cost of prescription drugs. As Attorney General of California, I took on pharmaceutical companies for deceptive marketing and illegally inflating the cost of drugs, and we won billions of dollars," she went on. "As the United States Senator, I fought to pass laws that would make health care more affordable and accessible for all Americans. And as vice president, together with Joe Biden, our president, we finally addressed the long standing issue that for years was one of the biggest challenges on this subject, which was that Medicare was prohibited by law from negotiating lower drug prices, and those costs then got passed on to our seniors. But not anymore."

Harris further noted that "two years ago, as vice president, I was proud to cast the tie breaking vote that sent the bill that gave Medicare the power to negotiate and let it get to the President's desk, and I was proud when our President, Joe Biden, signed that bill into law."