Vice President Kamala Harris gives remarks alongside U.S. President Joe Biden at Prince George’s Community College on August 15, 2024 in Largo, Maryland. Biden and Harris held the event to talk about their administration’s efforts to lower drug costs. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Chanting “thank you, Joe,” an energetic crowd welcomed President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris to Largo Thursday, in their first appearance together since she replaced him as the Democratic nominee for president.
The event at Prince George’s Community College was officially for the White House to announce that the government had negotiated lower prescription drug prices with pharmaceutical companies that will eventually save billions of dollars.
But it had all the feel of a campaign rally, with a cheering crowd of 2,300, a stage packed with Maryland Democrats and Biden at one point saying Harris “will make a hell of a president.”
It was the first public appearance for the two since Biden, under pressure from party leaders, quit his reelection bid less than a month ago and Harris stepped in to replace him. She won a virtual roll call of party delegates early this month to become the party’s nominee, a move that will be formally affirmed next week when Democrats gather in Chicago for their national convention.
If there were hard feelings, they were not evident Thursday.
“It is my eternal and great, great, great honor, I have to tell you, to serve with this most extraordinary human being and American and leader, our President Joe Biden,” Harris said as she introduced Biden.
For his part, Biden said his administration will work to expand a $35-a-month cap on insulin for Medicare Part D recipients to everyone. But if it’s not finished before he leaves office next year, he said, “Kamala when she’s president is going to make sure … everybody should qualify for that $35 a month.”
The year-old cap on insulin prices was just one of the lower drug prices the White House bragged about at Thursday’s event. The official reason for the gathering was to announce that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services had completed negotiations with major drug companies to reduce the prices of 10 popular and widely used prescription drugs.
The smallest price reduction, on the blood-cancer drug Imbruvica, was 38%. All the rest will see reductions above 50% with one, the diabetes drug Januvia, falling by 79%.
Those lower prices are scheduled to take effect in 2026, and will save the government an estimated $6 billion, according to the White House. They will also save patients about $1.5 billion in out-of-pocket expenses.
“A nurse I just met pays $9,000, including $900” on her prescriptions, Biden said. When the new lower prices kick in, “every single prescription drug she has … the maximum she’ll have to pay is $2,000.”
Many in the crowd had experiences with what Gov. Wes Moore (D) called the “brokenness of a health care system.”
Moore talked about being a child and his father being “released from the hospital with the instructions to go home and get some rest and hours after they released him, he died in front of me.”
“We have an obligation to make sure that our health care system never overlooks any of us,” Moore told the crowd.
Also in the crowd was Larry Zarzecki, a traumatic brain injury survivor and a person with Parkinson’s disease, who said he has struggled with the high cost of prescriptions. He sees hope in the lower costs that were negotiated by the government, under authority granted in 2022 by the Inflation Reduction Act.
“The cost of my medications over the past five years has been well over $100,000. My medications are about $3,000 a month now,” Zarzecki said. “The IRA is so important because it will help the quality of my life, and my ability to afford healthier food.”
Beverly Simmons, an Air Force veteran who retired medically, said that “from 2010 to 2020, I had been highly medicated. Now I’m retired but my retirement didn’t pay for all the medication it was too expensive for me to afford. So a medical affordable act is so important.”
“What Vice President Kamala Harris needs to do is help us. Help the people who cannot afford medications,” Simmons said.
Outside the Novak Field House, a small group of Green Party supporters held up signs for Jill Stein, their presidential nominee, and Biden faced some pro-Palestinian protesters during remarks in an overflow room after the event, according to a White House press pool report. But the mood inside the field house was overwhelmingly supportive.
The 90-minute event was heavy on health care speakers, including Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra and CMS Administrator Chiquita Brooks-LaSure.
But many in the crowd were also excited to see Harris in Prince George’s County where she’s often showered with love from alumni of Howard University, her alma mater, and members of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, which she belonged to, and other Black Greek organizations. People like Kay Proctor.
“I actually went to school, I was in the same class with Kamala Harris, I was Howard University 1986 and she’s also my soror (sorority sister),” Proctor said before the event. “And so I’m supporting her, President Biden, and the administration to the full extent.”
Maryland Matters is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Maryland Matters maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Steve Crane for questions: editor@marylandmatters.org. Follow Maryland Matters on Facebook and X.
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Publish date : 2024-08-16 01:23:00
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