Yesterday President Obama revealed a plan, expected to cost $950 billion over 10 years, to renew the administrations push for healthcare reform.  The plan proposes to provide coverage to more than 31 million uninsured Americans.

More details:

• The plan includes a measure designed to close the Medicare “donut-hole” gap for prescription drug coverage, which leaves seniors paying the full cost of medicines during a certain stage of the programme due to coverage limits.
• Obama proposes increasing fees paid by the pharmaceutical industry $10 billion over 10 years and above the $23-billion increase proposed under the Senate bill. Obama’s plan also delays implementation of these fees by one year to 2011.
• Obama’s plan includes provisions designed to increase access to generic drugs by giving the Federal Trade Commission the authority to address the practice of “pay for delay” agreements between brand name and generic drug manufacturers. The plan suggests prohibiting generic drug manufacturers from accepting “anything of value from a brand-name manufacturer that contains a provision in which the generic drug manufacturer agrees to limit or forgo research, development, marketing, manufacturing or sales of the generic drug.” Such deals could only be reached if the parties “demonstrate by clear and convincing evidence that the pro-competitive benefits of the agreement outweigh the anti-competitive effects of the agreement.”

The plan will be debated this week at a bipartisan healthcare summit.

Source: FirstWord

Filed under: Health Policy