President Joe Biden’s first actions included a directive that suspends President Donald Trump’s executive order aimed at lowering the prices of insulin and epinephrine, which was to have gone into effect on Friday, January 22.
The directive, issued by White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain, suspends new regulations for 60 days while the new administration can conduct a review.
Those regulations include the new rules finalized for insulin and epinephrine.
As Fox News noted:
The Department of Health and Human Services on Thursday announced that the directive [for insulin and epinephrine] would be put on hold among a number of other measures that were passed under Trump, but are not yet in effect.
The measure, signed off on in December, aimed to require some community health centers to deliver savings to low-income patients for insulin and epinephrine in a bid to bring down unaffordable prices.
The rule was scheduled to go into effect on Friday but has since been delayed until March 22.
Bloomberg Law cited critics of the Trump rule who said that health centers providing the drugs “already pass on those savings and this [Trump] rule is merely an administrative burden that paints them as entities that price-gouge patients.”
Trump prided himself on efforts to lower drug prices in the absence of congressional action, cutting red tape at the Food and Drug Administration for drug approvals, and using executive orders in an effort to force the pharmaceutical industry to cut prices. Though he worked with the industry in Operation Warp Speed to develop vaccines far faster than anyone previously thought possible, he clashed repeatedly with the industry in public as it supported negative ads against him.
Under President Trump, prescription drug prices fell, on aggregate, for the first time in nearly half a century.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His newest e-book is How Not to Be a Sh!thole Country: Lessons from South Africa. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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