The following content is sponsored by Americans for Limited Government.
One of the things we sometimes say to be nice is that Joe Biden cannot possibly be in command of his administration – that it must be rogue actors making these terrible policy decisions for him.
What can’t be denied is that his administration, whether he’s actually in charge of it or not, is abusing American seniors just trying to get their medicine. The cure – as for many of the world’s problems – is to go back to what Donald Trump had already been doing.
This year, premiums are up more than 20 percent for the more than 50 million Americans enrolled in Medicare Part D. In 2025, it’s estimated that premiums could go up another 50 percent! What could actually lower healthcare costs for seniors is if the federal government brings back the Trump Rebate Rule.
In 2020, President Trump announced a policy that provided seniors the chance to capture the rebates that drug manufacturers pay back to pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) for preferred placement on the insurers’ drug formularies. The rebate was designed to help seniors with very expensive medications. At the time, Trump proposed a concrete plan for helping those seniors, and the total savings could be billions and billions for them.
Trump said the rebate rule “will save American seniors billions of dollars by preventing middlemen — the famous middlemen, they call them — from ripping off Medicare patients with high prescription prices.”
“So, the patients are going to be now getting the benefit, instead of these very wealthy individuals,” Trump said at the time. “Today’s action ends this injustice and requires that these discounts go directly to the people. These are the people that need it.”
And although Biden has been publicly critical of PBMs himself, his administration killed Trump’s rebate rule when PBMs filed a lawsuit against it. Now, this could have just been a prudent move on their part to postpone the rule until it was resolved in the courts, or it could have been a blatantly political stunt to kill one of Trump’s policies so he couldn’t claim it as a win in his re-election.
That latter theory seems to have been affirmed by the so-called Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the Biden administration’s signature domestic “achievement,” which has resulted in the worst inflation in modern times. The IRA repealed the Trump drug rebate rule, preventing those seniors most at risk from getting the savings they needed.
And seniors weren’t getting any money back, because the Biden administration needed to rob Medicare to subsidize Chinese electric vehicles (EV) with $300 billion in tax credits. As we’ve previously reported previously:
China is co-opting American companies and sucking billions in green scam tax credits. The IRA doesn’t stop China’s government-owned green energy industry from setting up pop-up shops in America to qualify for tax credits, while importing everything from China. So, they’re stealing tax credits that could go to American companies.
This is yet another instance where Democrats will sacrifice the needs of vulnerable Americans on the altar of their Green God.
Seniors have been particularly harmed by the economic damage of the last three years. Inflation erodes the life savings of those on fixed incomes who struggle to pay for groceries or other necessities. They have paid their entire lives into the Medicare system that was supposed to be there to take care of them and not Chinese companies, the increasingly unpopular electric vehicle market, or prescription-drug middlemen.
In its proclamation last week rebuking elder abuse, the Biden White House proudly stated, “Older Americans are the heart and soul of our families, our communities, and our Nation” and that we must “develop new opportunities to improve our Nation’s prevention of and response to elder abuse, neglect, and exploitation.”
Maybe the White House could start by not ruining Medicare? They won’t get that chance if Trump gets elected again in November and delivers real relief to seniors by restoring his rebate rule.