Sounds like a good idea. It seems like everyone is talking about the high price of prescription drugs these days, and there's a good reason. Drug prices have skyrocketed rising faster than any other part of health care. At the same time, US consumers pay more for the same drugs than people in almost every other country. Federal candidates from both parties have proposals they say would help lower the cost of prescription drugs. And many of those ideas sound good, but would they really help control drug prices? One popular idea is to let Medicare negotiate prices. For the drugs it helps provide to seniors and some people with disabilities. Congress banned direct negotiation when it created the Medicare drug benefit in 2003. Computing the law is popular with the public, but most experts, including the Congressional Budget Office, Congress's official scorekeeper, say it wouldn't save much money. That's because drug makers won't reduce their prices voluntarily unless they get something in return. Private companies that manage drug benefits for most employers do negotiate with drug makers. Often the drug maker that offers the biggest discount will get preferred status on a list of approved medications and therefore more sales. But Medicare isn't currently allowed to create a list of preferred drugs either, so drug makers wouldn't get much in return for lowering their prices unless that part of the law got changed too. Another popular idea among candidates is to put a nationwide cap on the amount of money patients with private insurance can be required to pay for their drugs. People states have already done this with limits that mostly range from 100 to $250 per month. But while these laws help individual patients, particularly those who need the most expensive drugs, they don't do anything to reduce the overall cost of prescription drugs. That's because limits like these just pass the rest of the cost of the drugs back to the insurance company. The insurer in turn passes them back to everyone in the plan through higher premiums. So while lots of proposals for lowering drug prices may sound like a good idea, the problem is a lot more complicated than many candidates suggest.