The Inflation Reduction Act provides extensive tax breaks for clean energy and authorizes Medicare to negotiate the prices of certain prescription drugs, reflecting long-standing progressive priorities.
Taken together, these pieces of legislation should put to bed the notion that Biden and the Democrats can’t get anything done, and they also demonstrate that his election pledge to pursue bipartisan initiatives wasn’t an empty one. Despite the hyper-partisanship in Washington, three of the four bills gained some Republican support.
The Inflation Reduction Act—so-named to placate Manchin—contains the biggest effort to tackle climate change that the U.S. government has taken. Right now, thanks largely to the retirement of coal-fired electricity plants, the country is on track to reduce its carbon emissions by about thirty per cent by 2030, compared to 2005.
Another important element of the bill is that it would empower Medicare to use its heft to negotiate lower prescription-drug prices. Other public health-care systems, such as the United Kingdom’s National Health Service, have long haggled over the prices that they pay pharmaceutical companies. In this country, the Big Pharma lobby has managed to maintain a system in which drug companies can largely dictate their own prices.
The legislation also places an annual cap on prescription-drug outlays for people covered by Medicare. In this way and others, it reflects some long-standing progressive priorities. “The best that can be said of the bill is that it represents a significant reorientation of policy in a number of areas,” Felicia Wong, the president of the liberal Roosevelt Institute, told me. “It starts things in the direction we need to be going.
Wong also emphasized that the new spending bill doesn’t go far enough—a point that is indisputable. For all the worthwhile things it contains, many others got left out from Biden’s original agenda. A short list incudes the enhanced
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