Claim: Pelosi sets Medicare showdown on drug costs and new benefits.
Verdict: SUPPORTS

Retrieved passages:
title: Manhattan Institute for Policy Research
text: 1332 "state innovation" waivers giving states the flexibility to increase choice, competition, and affordability under the ACA. The Institute's health care scholars oppose allowing the federal government to negotiate prices in the Medicare Part D prescription drug program and believe that drug price negotiating has adverse effects in the Veterans Administration. Paul Howard argues that the first step in reforming Medicaid is for Congress to enact per-capita spending caps. In 2016, Howard argued that California’s Proposition 61–a measure that would have imposed price controls on some prescription drugs in the state – was a flawed proposal that might have actually

title: Nancy Pelosi
text: passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010. Pelosi was a key figure in convincing President Barack Obama to continue pushing for health care reform after the election of Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown in a January special election, a defeat that was seen as potentially fatal to Democratic reform efforts. After delivering 219 votes in the House for Obama's signature health care package, Pelosi was both praised and heckled as she made her way to Capitol Hill. Pelosi has voted to increase Medicare and Medicaid benefits. She does not endorse Senator Bernie Sanders' bill for single payer

title: Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act
text: votes from "yea" to "nay". The bill passed 220-215. The Democrats cried foul, and Bill Thomas, the Republican chairman of the Ways and Means committee, challenged the result in a gesture to satisfy the concerns of the minority. He subsequently voted to table his own challenge; the tally to table was 210 ayes, 193 noes. The Senate's consideration of the conference report was somewhat less heated, as cloture on it was invoked by a vote of 70-29. However, a budget point of order raised by Tom Daschle, and voted on. As 60 votes were necessary to override it, the challenge

title: Political positions of Ron Paul
text: the costs of medications for the elderly and disabled, and which prohibited the government from negotiating directly with pharmaceutical companies to try to get lower prices for the covered medications. In 2007, he again went against the majority of House Republicans when he voted with all of the Democrats in support of the Medicare Prescription Drug Price Negotiation Act, which, if enacted, would have given the government the authority to negotiate Medicare Part D drug prices with the manufacturers. During the 2012 presidential primary campaign, Paul said that although he remains opposed to Medicare Part D, repealing it was not

title: Nancy Pelosi
text: healthcare. On March 10, 2017, Pelosi stated that Democrats would continue battling Republican efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act but would also be willing to form a compromise measure in the event that Republicans were unable to pass a compromise bill and reached out for bipartisan support. She indicated her support for the Republican plan to expand Health Savings Accounts and said the question of Republicans accepting an expansion of Medicaid was important. In September, Pelosi sent a letter to Democrats praising Senator John McCain for announcing his opposition to the latest Republican effort to repeal and replace the

title: Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act
text: lobbyist for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), the trade association and lobby group for the drug industry with a "rumored salary of $2 million a year," drawing criticism from Public Citizen, the consumer advocacy group. They claimed that Tauzin "may have been negotiating for the lobbying job while writing the Medicare legislation." Tauzin was responsible for including a provision that prohibited Medicare from negotiating prices with drug companies. House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi said, The bill was debated and negotiated for nearly six months in Congress, and finally passed amid unusual circumstances. Several times in the legislative

title: Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act
text: a $180 to $265 annual deductible, 25% (or approximate flat copay) of full drug costs up to $2,400. After the initial coverage limit is met, a period commonly referred to as the "Donut Hole" begins when an enrollee may be responsible for the insurance company's negotiated price of the drug, less than the retail price without insurance. The Affordable Care Act, also commonly known as "Obamacare", modified this measure. With the passage of the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, Medicare beneficiaries were given the option to receive their Medicare benefits through private health insurance plans, instead of through the Original

title: Nancy Pelosi
text: Affordable Care Act and called for both lawmakers and advocacy groups to put pressure on Republicans in the health care discussion. Pelosi said the Democrats would be unified as putting "a stake in the heart of this monstrous bill". In July 2018, during a speech at Independence First, Pelosi said the goal of the Democrats "has always been to expand coverage and to do so in a way that improves benefits ... and we have to address the affordability issue that is so undermined by the Republicans." In November 2018, after the Democrats gained a majority in the House following

title: Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act
text: prescription drugs in patient care has significantly increased. As new and expensive drugs have come into use, patients, particularly senior citizens at whom Medicare was targeted, have found prescriptions harder to afford. The MMA was designed to address this problem. The benefit is funded in a complex way, reflecting diverse priorities of lobbyists and constituencies. Beginning in 2006, a prescription drug benefit called Medicare Part D was made available. Coverage is available only through insurance companies and HMOs, and is voluntary. Enrollees paid the following initial costs for the initial benefits: a minimum monthly premium of $24.80 (premiums may vary),

title: Political positions of Ron Paul
text: private contracts, and binding arbitration to resolve medical disputes benefits patients, who receive full compensation in a timelier manner than under the current system," as well as physicians and hospitals, since their litigation costs, and malpractice insurance premiums, would be markedly reduced. Paul proposes that all government funding of medical care be eliminated (with the exception, perhaps, of care for veterans). His Plan to Restore America budget proposal would begin a phase out of Medicare starting in 2013, when workers younger than 25 would be able to opt out of participating in the program. He says that during the transition

title: Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act
text: the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003." Douglas Holtz-Eakin, CBO director during the George W. Bush administration, who later served as the chief economic policy adviser to U.S. Senator John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign, alleged that the bill would increase the deficit by $562 billion because, he argued, it front-loaded revenue and back-loaded benefits. Scheiber and Cohn rejected critical assessments of the law's deficit impact, arguing that predictions were biased towards underestimating deficit reduction. They noted that for example, it is easier to account for the cost of definite levels of subsidies to specified numbers of people than account for savings

title: The Path to Prosperity
text: private plans competing alongside the traditional fee for service option on a newly created Medicare Exchange. Medicare would provide a premium payment to either pay for or offset the premium of the plan chosen by the senior. This was similar to a plan developed with Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, but different enough so that the Democrat opposed it. To secure Medicaid benefits, the budget proposed converting the federal share of Medicaid spending into a block grant indexed for inﬂation and population growth. The 2013 proposal also caps non-defense discretionary federal spending at $1.029 trillion and consolidates the six existing

title: Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act
text: that the cost would actually be over $500 billion. One month after passage, the administration estimated that the net cost of the program over the period between 2006 (the first year the program started paying benefits) and 2015 would be $534 billion. As of February 2009, the projected net cost of the program over the 2006 to 2015 period was $549.2 billion. Since the enactment of Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act in 2003, only insurance companies administering Medicare prescription drug program, not Medicare, have the legal right to negotiate drug prices directly from drug manufacturers. The Medicare Prescription

title: Medicare Part D
text: on average, than Part D. Estimating how much money could be saved if Medicare had been allowed to negotiate drug prices, economist Dean Baker gives a "most conservative high-cost scenario" of $332 billion between 2006 and 2013 (approximately $50 billion a year). Economist Joseph Stiglitz in his book entitled "The Price of Inequality" estimated a "middle-cost scenario" of $563 billion in savings "for the same budget window". Former Congressman Billy Tauzin, R–La., who steered the bill through the House, retired soon after and took a $2 million a year job as president of Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA),

title: Healthcare reform debate in the United States
text: in America." Criminals set up phony companies, then invoice Medicare for fraudulent services provided to valid Medicare patients who never receive the services. These costs appear on the Medicare statements provided to Medicare card holders. The program pays out over $430 billion per year via over 1 billion claims, making enforcement challenging. Its enforcement budget is "extremely limited" according to one Medicare official. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said in an interview: "Clearly more auditing needs to be done and it needs to be done in real time." The Obama administration provided Medicare with an additional $200 million to fight

title: Medicare Prescription Drug Price Negotiation Act of 2007
text: Medicare Prescription Drug Price Negotiation Act of 2007 In January 2007, the 110th United States House of Representatives approved , the Medicare Prescription Drug Price Negotiation Act, a bill to require federal officials to negotiate with drug companies for lower prices for the 23 million senior citizens who have signed up for Medicare's prescription drug coverage. If passed, the law would repeal a ban on letting the government negotiate with manufacturers for lower prices — a provision that was part of the GOP-sponsored 2003 measure called the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act, which created the prescription drug program.

title: Medicare Prescription Drug Price Negotiation Act of 2007
text: Medicare Prescription Drug Price Negotiation Act of 2007 In January 2007, the 110th United States House of Representatives approved , the Medicare Prescription Drug Price Negotiation Act, a bill to require federal officials to negotiate with drug companies for lower prices for the 23 million senior citizens who have signed up for Medicare's prescription drug coverage. If passed, the law would repeal a ban on letting the government negotiate with manufacturers for lower prices — a provision that was part of the GOP-sponsored 2003 measure called the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act, which created the prescription drug program.

title: Political positions of Newt Gingrich
text: quality, medical outcomes or price". Gingrich supported the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003, creating the Medicare Part D federal prescription drugs benefit program. While he has received some criticism from conservatives over the cost of the plan, Gingrich has reiterated his support in years since, saying that it represented necessary modernization of the system, as Medicare was created in the 1960s, before pharmaceutical drugs were in widespread use. He also stated that the costs of providing medication must be balanced against the decreased need for medical procedures. The same year, Gingrich founded the Center for Health

title: Political positions of Mitt Romney
text: House of Representatives had passed a Republican alternative budget proposed by Ryan, with no Democrats voting for it. One controversial aspect of the proposal concerned Medicare; for those under age 55 as of its enactment, it would replace the existing Medicare system in which the government pays doctors, hospitals, and other medical providers fees for services rendered with a system in which the government would instead pay vouchers (also referred to as premium-support subsidies) to Medicare beneficiaries, who could then use their vouchers to either buy private medical insurance or to obtain coverage in a plan similar to traditional Medicare.

title: Medicare (United States)
text: cost savings. Estimated savings from more effective coordinated care for the dual eligibles range from $125 billion to over $200 billion, mostly by eliminating unnecessary, expensive hospital admissions. Income-relating Medicare premiums Both House Republicans and President Obama proposed increasing the additional premiums paid by the wealthiest people with Medicare, compounding several reforms in the ACA that would increase the number of wealthier individuals paying higher, income-related Part B and Part D premiums. Such proposals are projected to save $20 billion over the course of a decade, and would ultimately result in more than a quarter of Medicare enrollees paying between