Sen­ate Dems call to add Medicare drug price ne­go­ti­a­tions to rec­on­cil­i­a­tion bill; Cer­tara signs $310M buy­out of soft­ware com­pa­ny

Don’t for­get to in­clude drug pric­ing re­forms in the up­com­ing $3.5 tril­lion rec­on­cil­i­a­tion bill, Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Di­anne Fe­in­stein (D-CA) and 10 of their col­leagues urged Sen­ate lead­ers Chuck Schumer, Bernie Sanders and Ron Wyden in a let­ter Thurs­day.

De­moc­rats are hard at work on two ma­jor bills: one re­lat­ed to in­fra­struc­ture, which could pass the Sen­ate as ear­ly as to­day, and the oth­er re­lat­ed to dif­fer­ent spend­ing projects and which will be passed via rec­on­cil­i­a­tion, mean­ing the De­moc­rats on­ly need a sim­ple ma­jor­i­ty and not the usu­al 60 votes. It’s the rec­on­cil­i­a­tion bill that may al­low Medicare to ne­go­ti­ate drug prices, a planned move that could save the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment hun­dreds of mil­lions, but which has al­ready spurred lob­by­ing group PhRMA to run a sev­en-fig­ure ad cam­paign against it.

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