Congress
Senators unveil bipartisan plan to lower drug costs
Sens. Josh Hawley and Peter Welch are teaming up on bipartisan legislation aimed at lowering drug costs by barring drug companies in the U.S. from charging higher prices than the international average.
While their bill is different from what the Trump administration is proposing to help finance the GOP’s megabill of tax cuts and extensions, border security investments and more, it underscores the cross-party and populist interest in cracking down on pharmaceutical companies. The White House is pushing a proposal to reduce spending in Medicaid by aligning what the safety net program pays for drugs with the lower prices paid abroad.
In a statement shared first with Blue Light News, Hawley, a Missouri Republican, tied the bipartisan legislation to President Donald Trump’s efforts during his first term to link drug prices in the United States to those in other high-income nations.
“This bipartisan legislation would continue that work to end a drug market that favors Big Pharma, make prescriptions affordable again, and empower Americans to get the care they need,” Hawley said.
Where congressional Republicans ultimately end up on drug pricing as part of their yet-to-be-finalized policy package remains to be seen. While the White House is pushing what it is calling a “most favored nation” plan, Speaker Mike Johnson poured cold water on the idea during an interview last week.
Hawley, meanwhile, is a key vote to watch on the Republicans’ sweeping party-line bill — and as part of the Senate’s debate on that measure, lawmakers will be able to offer unlimited amendments on nearly any proposal. He said that “if Republicans want to save money on health care costs in reconciliation, this is where to start.”
In addition to prohibiting pharmaceutical companies from selling drugs within the United States at a higher price than the international average, it also would impose a penalty if companies violate the prohibition.
“Big Pharma’s price gouging has made that a reality for many Americans, forcing them to pay four or five times more for the same lifesaving medications as folks in other countries — it’s unacceptable,” said Welch, a Vermont Democrat.
The legislation would go after the list price of drugs, but most Americans don’t pay the list price when getting prescriptions filled. That’s because health insurers and pharmacy benefit managers are able to negotiate lower costs.
The pharmaceutical industry is expected to fiercely oppose such a move, having previously argued that so-called international reference pricing and other similar “government price controls” would lead to significant barriers to accessing treatments for patients, including longer wait times for medications.
The Congressional Budget Office found last year that an international reference pricing policy based on prices in several other high income countries, including Canada, France and the United Kingdom, would reduce average drug prices in 2031 by more than 5 percent.
Congress
The megabill will soon be megalaw
House Republicans passed their domestic policy megabill Thursday after nearly 24 hours of nonstop angst, discord and hands-on pressure from President Donald Trump and allies — ultimately uniting to deliver his top legislative priority.
The 218-214 final vote is a major victory for congressional Republicans who pledged to send the bill to Trump’s desk before July 4. Speaker Mike Johnson muscled the bill through in the early-morning hours after a full day of meetings with holdouts, huddles on the House floor and gatherings of different factions at the White House.
One preliminary vote Wednesday was held open for more than nine hours — what Democrats claimed was a new House record — as GOP leaders scrambled to secure the votes. Once they did, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries delayed final action almost another nine hours with a record-breaking floor speech attacking the 887-page bill.
The decisive vote ended up almost entirely along party lines. Only Republican Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania and Thomas Massie of Kentucky joined Democrats in opposition to the bill.
What was not clear upon passage is what precisely a small band of holdouts, most of them members of the House Freedom Caucus, had secured in return for their votes. They were irate about changes that had been made to the bill in the Senate, but GOP leaders were insistent that no further tweaks would be made — which would require another time-consuming trip across Capitol Hill.
The holdouts had been discussing the possibility of executive actions and other promises pertaining to the implementation of the sweeping legislation. But Johnson insisted no deals were cut.
“We find out where the red lines are, and we try to navigate around them and get a product that everybody can buy into,” he told reporters.
Angry Democrats, who had been left in a holding pattern most of the day Wednesday and deep into the night, seethed at the situation.
“I have no idea what in the world the crowd that was holding out got for holding out,” said Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.) on the floor. “Does anyone know? It is a complete mystery to me and to the American people.”
To most Republicans, however, final passage came as a relief after more than six months of intensive intraparty debates and negotiations about how the centerpiece of the Republican legislative agenda should be structured and what should be included.
The centerpiece was always set to be an extension of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the signature bill of Trump’s first term. But Republicans quickly sparred over whether those tax cuts — a legislative hornet’s nest — should be packaged together with other, easier-to-pass GOP priorities or lopped off to pass separately.
Trump sided with lawmakers, mainly in the House, who wanted to pass the whole domestic agenda in one piece, and what Trump would deem the “one big, beautiful bill” was born. On top of the tax package, which eventually swelled in excess of $4 trillion, were defense spending boosts, increased immigration enforcement and dramatic changes to some safety-net programs to help offset the costs.
Republicans seized on rosy projections from White House economists while most independent analysts concluded the bill’s economic impacts would be relatively modest.
House Budget Chair Jodey Arrington (R-Texas) touted the “largest tax cut in U.S. history” Thursday morning and promised a flurry of economic benefits, despite the bill mainly continuing tax policies already in place.
“We can expect record job growth, investment, repatriation of capital back to the United States, record-low unemployment, record-high wage growth and the lowest poverty rates in recorded history,” he said.
While the tax cuts were the glue meant to hold GOP support for the bill together, it was not always clear that hard-line fiscal hawks and moderate purple-district Republicans would be able to come to terms on a single piece of legislation.
Those concerns were amplified after the Senate reshaped the bill the House passed in late May, making steeper cuts to Medicaid and speeding up the rollback of wind and solar energy tax credits, while also adding hundreds of billions of dollars more to the deficit than the House-passed bill did.
Key blocs of House Republicans initially blanched at the changes, leading to hours of meetings Wednesday between GOP leadership and holdouts in an effort to quell the rebellion. With further changes to the bill off the table, lawmakers talked up the possibility of future executive actions from Trump. White House Budget Director Russ Vought came to the Capitol to discuss the possibility of future spending cuts with hard-liners and how exactly the administration planned to target key programs.
Meanwhile, among purple-district Republicans nervous about a roughly $1 trillion cut to Medicaid, there were major concerns over how medical providers in their districts might be able to access a limited $50 billion fund for rural hospitals created in the Senate and whether the funding patch would be enough to compensate for cuts elsewhere.
The Congressional Budget Office estimated the Senate-passed megabill would increase the number of people without health insurance by roughly 11.8 million in 2034. That estimate was posted before a slate of last-minute changes were made to the bill before Senate passage earlier this week.
Democrats vowed Republicans would pay a steep political price for passing the megabill, with some comparing it to the health care bill Republicans abandoned in 2017 — preceding a GOP House wipeout in the subsequent midterms. In speeches throughout the day, Democratic leaders name-checked purple-district Republicans whose districts they hope to target in next year’s midterm elections.
The minority party had few tools to stop the bill’s passage, and their plans to at least slow it down were at first overtaken by the GOP’s own snail-like progress. But then Jeffries used his unlimited speaking time Thursday morning to lash into what he called “one big, ugly bill” that coddled billionaires, undermined clean energy production and slashed the social safety net, delaying passage until Thursday afternoon.
“I ask the question, if Republicans were so proud of this one big ugly bill, why did the debate begin at 3:28 a.m. in the morning?” Jeffries said at the outset of his speech, accusing Republicans of trying to “jam this bill through the House of Representatives under the cover of darkness.”
Jeffries took special aim at the bill’s health care cuts — reading story after story from Americans who rely on Medicaid for their medical needs and calling out the particular Republican lawmakers who represent them. He also mocked Trump’s insistence that he would protect the program.
“He was going to ‘love and cherish’ Medicaid,” he said. “Nothing about this bill ‘loves and cherishes’ Medicaid. It guts Medicaid.”
The bill now heads to Trump’s desk, and he’s expected to sign it on the holiday, Johnson told reporters: “We’ll do that on July 4, potentially, maybe right before the B-2s fly. I mean you just can’t script this any better.”
David Lim and Cassandra Dumay contributed to this report.
Congress
Hakeem Jeffries breaks the House record for longest floor speech
Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries is now delivering the longest speech in House history, holding the floor for more than eight hours to delay passage of Republicans’ domestic policy megabill.
His so-called “magic minute,” as the unlimited speaking time granted to party leaders is known, breaks a record set by Republican Kevin McCarthy in 2021, which in turn exceeded the mark set by Nancy Pelosi in 2018. All were serving as minority leader at the time.
Starting at 4:52 a.m., Jeffries used his hours of speaking time to read letters from constituents who could be affected by cuts to social safety-net programs and to single out purple-district Republicans who are in line to support the legislation whose districts Democrats plan to target in next year’s midterms.
The speech is Democrats’ last option to slow down the megabill ahead of a final passage vote. It’s still expected to pass later Thursday, ahead of the GOP’s self-imposed July 4 deadline.
“I’m here today to make it clear that I’m going to take my time and ensure that the American people fully understand how damaging this bill will be to their quality of life,” he said, later adding: “Donald Trump’s deadline may be Independence Day. That ain’t my deadline.”
Republicans largely shrugged off Jeffries’ speech, which set the new record at 1:25 p.m. after eight hours and 33 minutes. Speaker Mike Johnson called it “an utter waste of everyone’s time, but that’s part of the system here.”
Unlike in the Senate, debate time in the House is typically strictly limited, but there is an exception for top party leaders, who are allowed to speak without interruption under chamber precedent.
Progress on the megabill wasn’t just stalled out by Jeffries’ speech. Opposition by conservative hard-liners to changes made by the Senate led to one procedural vote being left open for more than nine hours Wednesday — the longest vote in House history, according to Democrats. GOP leaders pulled an all-nighter to flip lawmakers and eventually cleared the last procedural vote around 3:30 a.m., setting up Jeffries’ effort.
Cassandra Dumay contributed to this report.
Congress
Johnson says he has the votes to pass the GOP megabill
Speaker Mike Johnson predicted Thursday morning he had the votes to pass Republicans’ domestic policy megabill and would lose only “one or two” GOP lawmakers ahead of a self-imposed July 4 deadline.
“We’ll get this. We’ll land this plane before July 4,” he told reporters.
GOP leaders are barreling toward a final passage vote on the megabill as soon as this afternoon after pulling an all-nighter to advance the bill over the initial opposition of conservative holdouts upset at changes the Senate made to the package. Still, Johnson told reporters that while GOP lawmakers needed “time to digest” the Senate’s changes, many of their concerns were allayed with the help of President Donald Trump and his administration.
“The president helped answer questions. We had Cabinet secretaries involved, and experts in all the fields, and I think they got there,” he said.
He brushed aside concerns about Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.), a purple-district lawmaker who was the sole lawmaker to oppose the procedural vote, saying he “tried to encourage him to get to a yes” though Johnson acknowledged Fitzpatrick has “got a number of things he’s just concerned about.”
The final vote has been delayed by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’ so-called magic minute, or the unlimited speaking time granted to party leaders that’s been stretched into its sixth hour. Jeffries could break the all-time record set by then-House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who spoke for about eight and a half hours in 2021 to delay passage of Democrats’ domestic policy package.
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