Burgess leaves a meeting at the Capitol Hill Club in 2022. Photo: Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call Inc. via Getty Images
The House Budget Committee's health care task force is ramping up its efforts to examine how health care spending is affecting the budget.
Driving the news: On Thursday, Rep. Michael Burgess hosted the first of the health care task force meetings, which was focused on discussing the Inflation Reduction Act's drug pricing provisions.
- Health task force members met with current Congressional Budget Office director Phillip Swagel, former CBO director Doug Holtz-Eakin, and other experts to discuss and understand how CBO determined how drug development would be affected by the IRA.
- CBO estimated last year that the IRA's drug pricing provisions would result in only one fewer drug being introduced in the U.S. market over 10 years.
- That's despite pharmaceutical companies arguing that the IRA significantly affects how many new drugs will be developed.
What they're saying: Burgess told reporters after the meeting that the goal wasn't necessarily to challenge what CBO has put out, but to understand the data and how they come to the conclusions that they do.
- "We didn't want to keep score with the CBO. We wanted to understand what goes into their development [model]. Why would they make a statement that it's one drug a year that we're going to miss?" Burgess said.
He also suggested that the next steps for the health care task force could include looking specifically at site-neutral policies, which were mentioned in the House Budget Committee's 2024 budget resolution.
- Another next step could include the Budget Committee holding a hearing on the Preventive Health Savings Act, Burgess said, which he has reintroduced over the years.
- That bill would instruct CBO to extend its analysis beyond the existing 10-year budget window, as a way to provide a more extensive analysis of the impact of preventive health legislation.
