Biden’s favor to Trump on cheaper drug prices includes a largely forgotten law to make Medicare more powerful

President Donald Trump has been taking credit for new federal data that shows U.S. prescription drug prices fell 0.8% in July and are down 3.1% from a year ago, the steepest year-over-year drop since 1963.

The plunging prices, the White House said, resulted from the Republican president’s “most favored nation” drug deals with pharmaceutical firms and the TrumpRx website, which it said are “delivering real relief to American families and putting patients first.”

The real picture is more complicated, said drug pricing experts, who noted that other factors, including a law from Democratic President Joe Biden’s time in office that allowed Medicare to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies, are potentially more significant contributors to the latest consumer price index figures.

Also at play, they said, are generic and biosimilar products that have come onto the market, offering competition that drives down the price of expensive brand-name and biologic drugs. In addition, the prescription drug price index measured by the Labor Department and released last week doesn’t directly reflect how much consumers pay — it measures how much pharmacies get paid for the drugs, both by insurers and consumers.

“It’s difficult to know in one number what’s going on beneath the hood,” said Juliette Cubanski, a vice president and director of the Program on Medicare Policy at the healthcare research nonprofit KFF. “I don’t think we can attribute this price reduction to any one specific policy change or initiative.”

Here’s what to know about the decline in prescription drug........

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