The Biden administration has outlined a detailed prescription for even greater government control over Americans’ medications.

Biden unveiled the broad outlines in his March 7 State of the Union address, and the Department of Health and Human Services filled in the details in the president’s proposed $7.3 trillion fiscal 2025 budget submission.

If Biden’s policy agenda were enacted by Congress, federal officials would extend Medicare’s current price-control regime into the private sector, affecting American citizens’ access to new drugs and breakthrough medications.

In his address to Congress, Biden declared that “Americans pay more for prescription drugs than anywhere in the world. It’s wrong, and I am ending it.”

Under the misleadingly named Inflation Reduction Act, in 2026 Medicare will fix the prices of 10 selected drugs, and the number of medications and therapies will get progressively larger after that date. But Biden made it clear—if there was any doubt—that the government’s price-control regime will be expansive.

Biden wants Medicare to be able to negotiate prices for more than 500 different drugs over the next decade, while expanding the government’s regulatory power over the private sector. Concerning the Medicare drug policy, the president claimed, “It will not only save lives, but it will also save taxpayers another $200 billion.”

Though Team Biden routinely describes the process of Medicare drug pricing as a process of “negotiation”—conjuring up the image of “give and take” of private sector contracting—nothing could be further from the truth.

Rather, Biden is reviving the oldest policy flop in........

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