WASHINGTON — Often, a president’s State of the Union address is a staid affair, with platitudes and calls for bipartisanship and unity.
But President Biden blasted the pharmaceutical industry with its unflattering moniker, “Big Pharma,” not once, but three times Thursday night, only the second time ever that sobriquet has been used in such a setting, after Biden’s address last year.
“We finally beat Big Pharma,” Biden said Thursday. “Medicare will no longer have to pay exorbitant prices to Big Pharma.”
Biden’s remarks reflect just how aggressively the White House is trying to publicize his administration’s 2022 law that empowered Medicare to negotiate drug prices. It also caps weekly insulin costs and annual out-of-pocket costs for retail drug spending for seniors, the first of which also got a shout-out in the address.
Those are popular policies with voters in both parties. But many don’t realize Democrats passed the new powers for Medicare, which has only just kicked off its first round of negotiations. Prices won’t take effect until 2026, and polling shows that a large majority of voters don’t know, or are unsure, that there is a law that directs Medicare to negotiate those prices.
KFF polled voters in both parties on those dual topics in November. The results: 83% favor price negotiation but only 32% know that Democrats passed that policy into law in 2022. Those results are consistent with a separate KFF poll from over the summer.
The pharmaceutical industry is working hard to dismantle the new law through a bevy of lawsuits. Administration lawyers faced off with pharmaceutical companies lawyers just hours before the address in a court in New Jersey.
The industry trade group PhRMA responded to the address with a statement blasting the law, saying “our industry employs hundreds of thousands of people who work each day to improve the lives of patients, and we need policies that support and strengthen their work, not put it at risk.”
Last year, Biden was a little less definitive, dinging “Big Pharma” for “unfairly charging people hundreds of dollars, $400 to $500 a month [for insulin], making record profits.” Former President Trump also brought up the industry in his 2020 State of the Union address, but he went with “big pharmaceutical companies” instead of the shorthand.
Later in his address on Thursday, Biden lumped the industry in with “Big Oil.”
“I also want to end the tax breaks for Big Pharma, Big Oil, private jets, and massive executive pay,” he said.
His remarks about the drug pricing policies and the tax breaks earned applause from Democrats but not Republicans. The same was true for Biden’s remarks about returning advanced manufacturing to America and a law that boosted U.S. manufacturing of computer chips.
Some in the biotechnology industry are calling for similar measures to prevent America from losing its grip on biotech, while Congress considers blocking Chinese biotechs from doing business in the United States.