The bill to reduce inflation, which could be passed next week, will cut health costs, invest in clean energy and impose a minimum tax rate on large companies
It’s not often that Joe Biden can boast of a good week, but this one is. He began by liquidating the leader of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, with a surgical procedure without casualties. It continued on Wednesday with the Senate ratification of Finland and Sweden’s admission to NATO. And it ends this Friday with the Senate debate on what would be the most important law of the year and one of the most important of its term. The one that will allow Democrats to show off their boobs during the holiday break, the starting gun for the election campaign that will renew Congress.
The so-called law to reduce inflation is a diverse package that includes social spending, tax control and environmental investments. It contains formulas for practically everything except controlling inflation, because as columnist Jennifer Rubin said in the Washington Post, “just because it’s in the name doesn’t mean it is.” In fact, most economists believe that any reduction will be minimal, because that will depend more on the price of energy, hit by the war in Ukraine, or production, which the covid has turned upside down.
The title is the least important, the most important is the content. Biden was able to boast of achieving something Democrats have been promising for 30 years, which is to lower the price of drugs for retirees. It involves authorizing the semi-public Medicare insurance to negotiate prices with pharmaceutical companies. It seems simple, but that lobby prevented it by convincing the country that any government intervention in the market would equate to price control, which would slow innovation and prevent pharmacological progress.
In addition, critics question the need to start cutting health costs from pharmaceutical companies, rather than going to hospitals, which have a greater impact on global costs. However, drugs are the ones that have the most impact on health insurance plans and the wallets of retirees.
When we talk about health in the US, we talk about a stratospheric universe that escapes the understanding of the European reader. For example, the new law would exempt all drugs that have been on the market for less than nine years and limit retirees’ costs in copays to just $2,000 a year. So relative is the damage that will be done to pharmaceutical companies, with whom a 25% discount would be negotiated on drugs at galloping prices, such as those for diabetes, 80% of which is borne by the government. According to the Kaiser Foundation, no more than 20 drugs, other than insulin, would qualify for those discounts.
Along the same lines of relativity is the “tax hike” that has shocked the Republican opposition. The establishment of a minimum corporate rate of 15% only affects those companies with a profit of more than a billion a year. Taking into account that the average citizen pays 22% on average, it seems reasonable that large companies with more benefits pay at least 15%.
According to the Institute for Fiscal and Economic Policy, 55 large multinationals such as Amazon, Fedex and Nike pay nothing at all in federal taxes. Senator Joe Manchin himself, one of the two most conservative Democrats in the party, who in this case takes credit for introducing the legislation, insists all that is being done is closing the loopholes to prevent them from escape through those holes. authorities are the ones with the most lawyers and accountants at the service of tax engineering.
All eyes are on Arizona Senator Krysten Sinema, the Democrat Democrat in the Senate. Due to the Solomonic division left by the polls, the party must face each of its senators so that the vice president can exercise the tiebreaker vote. For now, Sinema allows herself to be courted in silence, with the complicity of her best friend on camera, Manchin, the father of the law.
Source: La Verdad
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