by Raul Lopez
I was born in communist Cuba, where the government believed it could manage the economy better than ordinary people. It set prices. It controlled markets. It decided what things should cost and, too often, who could get them.
That experience shaped the way I look at Washington’s new approach to prescription drugs.
The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) passed under the Biden administration gave the federal government broad power to set what Medicare will pay for certain medicines. Supporters call it negotiation. However, when one side writes the rules, sets the terms, and can impose major penalties if a company refuses, that is not the kind of negotiation most Americans recognize.
It is government price-setting.
For someone who grew up understanding what centralized economic control can do, that should concern us. Of course, the United States is not Cuba. Our institutions are different, our economy is different and our freedoms are far stronger. Even so, the lesson is still worth remembering: government cannot create abundance simply by ordering lower prices.
A lower price on paper does not guarantee more medicine, more competition or more cures. Drug development is risky. Researchers can spend years working on a treatment that never succeeds. Companies invest billions of dollars without knowing whether a medicine will ever reach a patient. If Washington makes those investments less attractive, we should not be surprised when fewer investments are made. That matters to every family waiting for a better cancer treatment, a breakthrough for Alzheimer’s disease or a therapy for a rare condition.
It also matters for lower-cost medicines.
Health policy expert Sally Pipes recently warned the IRA could make some drug markets less attractive to generic and biosimilar manufacturers. If fewer companies decide to compete, patients could eventually face less competition and higher costs. That is the danger of trying to control prices from Washington and not relying on the free market and competition. Government can order a number to be lower. It cannot order a scientist to discover a cure, an entrepreneur to risk millions of dollars or competitors to enter a market that no longer makes economic sense. The free market without government intervention always delivers a better product at the lowest price and in the shortest amount of time. Government intervention ends up messing up the entire process.
Congress should repeal the IRA and replace its failed approach with reforms that actually expand competition, lower costs and protect innovation. Repeal does not have to mean abandoning every policy that helps patients. Congress can preserve protections that shield seniors from catastrophic out-of-pocket costs. It can pass targeted reforms to lower insulin costs. It can take on pharmacy middlemen that profit from an opaque system. It can also encourage more generic and biosimilar competition. Those policies should stand on their own merits. They should not be used to justify a massive law that expands federal control over health care and weakens the incentives that produce new treatments.
There is a difference between reforming a market and replacing it with government control. I have lived in a communist nation where government planners believe they know what’s best for everyone. There’s a reason we fled to the United States – the land of free markets and opportunity. There’s a reason people come here for access to the best healthcare in the world – we should preserve those conservative principles and not continue to implement socialistic policies passed during the Biden administration – that will lead us down the road to a failed economy and government like Cuba.
America became the world’s greatest engine of innovation because we took a different path—one built on freedom, competition, risk-taking and the belief that people closer to a problem usually understand it better than bureaucrats do. Congress should return to those principles.
Senator Blackburn rightfully opposed Biden’s IRA. Senator Blackburn, Senator Hagerty and our GOP congressmen in the Tennessee delegation should work with their colleagues in Congress and the Trump administration to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act. Keep what truly helps patients. Replace government price-setting with competition, transparency and policies that encourage the next generation of cures.
Latino families deserve lower drug costs today. They also deserve the medicines of tomorrow.
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Raul Lopez is the co-founder and chairman of Latinos for Tennessee.
