Biden Admin Anticipates Lower Vaccine Costs for Seniors

Biden administration officials believe that seniors in Medicare Part D will see savings of hundreds of millions of dollars due to the 2022 reconciliation act, also known the Inflation Reduction Act.

Notably, these estimates don’t include COVID-19 shots, which fall under Medicare Part B.

“The law makes many recommended vaccines free for Medicare beneficiaries,” Susan Rice, the domestic policy czar of the administration, spoke to reporters on March 14.

The Department of Health and Human Services released a study of how the IRA affects seniors with Medicare Part D on March 15.

The law provides that older adults will not have to pay for common vaccines such as shingles, hepatitis B, tetanus and hepatitis B.

The study calculated that people on Medicare Part D would have saved over $230 million on covered vaccines in 2021—almost $70 per person—if the IRA had been in effect then.

“In some cases, some people paid nearly $200 million for the shingles vaccine by itself,” Xavier Becerra (HHS Secretary) said it.

“Not anymore,” He concluded.

HHS also examined where Medicare Part D seniors paid the highest for vaccines in 2021.

The states with the highest out of pocket costs are Idaho, Wyoming and Kansas.

Rice and other participants on the call also highlighted the IRA’s insulin price limit, which was set at $35 per month for all Medicare seniors.

President Joe Biden’s March 9 budget proposal Fiscal Year 2024 would increase that cap to all people.

Insulin prices

In the past few weeks, insulin prices have been significantly reduced in America by Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly. They are two of three companies that make almost all insulin sold in America, and around the world.

Sanofi, the third major insulin supplier, has slashed insulin prices to $35 per month for uninsured Americans in the United States by 2022.

2020: The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, (CMS) set insulin prices at $35 a month for some Medicare beneficiaries.

In 2020, the Trump administration reported that Part D beneficiaries had saved $1.9 Billion since 2017, part of a trend Seema Verma, then-CMS Administrator, attributed to its favoring “competition and choice.”

HHS’s latest study comes weeks following the introduction of their Inflation Reduction Act by House Republicans, which would repeal the IRA from last year.

“Instead of creating any positive change for Americans facing record-breaking economic challenges, Leftists opted to increase federal spending and the deficit–by at least $110 billion dollars through 2031–in order to advance their personal political agendas,” In a February 2 press release, Rep. Andy Ogles (Republican from Tenn.), who introduced this legislation, said that.

The Congressional Budget Office’s 10-year outlook on the budget revised the projected deficit for the United States to $426 billion by the end of the 10th year. $23 billion of this was attributed to the IRA. The act’s effect on prescription drug pricing will allow it to project that it will reduce Medicare costs by $307 billion through 2032.

Rice called the Republicans’ counter-IRA and said that it would be “mean millions of Americans would pay higher health insurance premiums and higher taxes, millions of Americans would pay higher drug prices and insulin prices, and millions of seniors would be unable to get recommended vaccines for free.”