Good news! The US Senate is finally poised to move forward with its own legislative response to the Build Back Better bill passed by the House last fall. It will be much smaller in scope, and focus on key health care issues. The bill does not yet have a name or bill number.

The following provisions have been agreed upon so far:

• Empowering the federal government to negotiate lower drug prices with Big Pharma.
• Limiting how much drug corporations can raise drug prices each year to the general rate of inflation. (Typically, they raise their prices much more.)
• Capping out-of-pocket costs for Rx drugs for people on Medicare at $2,000 per year.
• Limiting how much Rx drug coverage goes up each year for people on Medicare.
• Free vaccines for people on Medicare.
• Keeping health insurance more affordable for people who buy their own coverage via Affordable Care Act (ACA) online marketplaces.

Many Senate Majority members and advocates are also pushing to add-in provisions to:

• Cap monthly co-pays for insulin to $35 per month per prescription
• Provide affordable health insurance to low-income people in states that have not yet expanded Medicaid to more low-income people and families under the ACA. (New York is not one of these states – we expanded our Medicaid program nearly a decade ago.)
• Expand Medicaid and the Child Health Insurance Program in various ways to help improve the health and well-being of new mothers and their babies, children, and adolescents.
• Free vaccines for all low-income people and families on public insurance programs.

Help is needed to get the insulin provisions included. Here’s what you can do:

• Organizations can sign-on to a letter to Senators that is being circulated by Patients for Affordable Drugs, AARP, and allies.
• Individuals can endorse and online petition that is being circulated by T1 International (a group of diabetes activists) and allies.

The final decisions about what ends up in a final package will come down to how much money is available overall, and the individual cost of this and that individual provision. What doesn’t make it in will remain to be pushed for later this fall after the elections as part of a federal budget deal, or next year by a new Congress. In either scenario, we will have our work cut out for us.

Both our US Senators from New York (Charles Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand) support all these ideas, as do many members of our state’s congressional delegation (all Democrats.)  The Senate is expected to vote on its bill during the first week of August, and the House will vote on it very soon thereafter. President Biden is then expected to quickly sign it.  

All that noted, we can take nothing for granted.  We urge you to contact both Senators Schumer and Gillibrand and your own member of Congress to urge that they move ahead to get this bill done before their August recess, since it’s now been well over a year that lawmakers have been working on it.

We want to acknowledge and thank all our partners and allies in Health Care for America Now’s New York State Network that we coordinate, for all our hard work together over many months to get us to this point. We couldn’t have done it without all of you. People power DOES matter.

While this final bill will not do everything we all want and need it to do to help everyday people in a whole lot of ways, it will nonetheless be historic in finally successfully taking on Big Pharma’s voracious profiteering and unconscionable price-gouging over many years.

Finally, all the ideas mentioned above are all VERY popular. There is no reason for any lawmaker or candidate for office to hesitate to embrace them. They are winning issues with voters across the political spectrum. We urge you to push for them during the coming election season.