AARP, the liberal lobbying organization that touts itself as America’s leading senior advocacy group, wants Democrats to greatly expand the Inflation Reduction Act’s drug price controls if they retake Congress and the White House.
To spur left-wing lawmakers into action, AARP recently released a report with an eye-popping conclusion: If Democrats change the IRA to add price controls on just 10 popular medicines that are currently exempt, it could save Medicare nearly $200 billion between 2029 and 2033.
The report is presumably meant to serve as a campaign-trail talking point for Democrats. And many senior voters will undoubtedly find that pitch enticing.
But there’s no such thing as a free lunch. AARP’s proposal would dramatically change Medicare. Seniors won’t necessarily find it easier to obtain already-existing treatments. But over time, far fewer new ones would reach the market.
In 2022, the last year Democrats had undivided control of Washington, they enacted the Inflation Reduction Act. That law empowered federal bureaucrats to set Medicare prices for certain brand-name drugs that don’t have any generic or biosimilar competitors.
Critics — myself included — warned at the time that these price controls would discourage medical research. Even the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projected that the law would result in fewer new drugs reaching patients.
Those warnings have already come to pass. Biotech companies have discontinued at least 56 research programs and 26 experimental drugs since the IRA became law just four years ago.
But even Democrats recognized that immediate, across-the-board price controls would gut medical innovation. So they built some guardrails into the IRA.
For instance, the IRA exempts newly FDA-approved drugs from price controls for at least nine years, so that biotech companies have at least some chance to recoup their development costs. It exempts certain rare-disease drugs entirely. And lawmakers limited the number of medicines subject to price controls each year — starting with 10 drugs in 2026, then 15 in both 2027 and 2028, and 20 more each subsequent year.
The IRA also kept the price controls broadly anchored to the prices paid by U.S. commercial insurers.
But now, AARP wants Democrats to go much further — and throw their earlier caution to the wind.
The group suggests capping Medicare prices at the artificially low levels paid by foreign countries, making drugs eligible for price controls just three years after they hit the market, and dramatically expanding the number of treatments subject to price controls each year.
In AARP’s model, Medicare spending on 10 popular, currently exempt drugs would plunge from roughly $273 billion to $76 billion from 2029 through 2033 — a 72% reduction.
That would obviously cause nearly all biotech companies to rethink their research investments. If Medicare and Medicaid began paying the same artificially capped prices that foreign countries’ socialized healthcare systems pay, it would cut research and development spending by almost half — and prevent the development of 210 new drugs over a decade, according to University of Chicago economists.
Seniors currently battling cancer, Alzheimer’s, and other diseases — or who will face diagnoses in the years and decades ahead — need that research to happen, and those treatments to come to market. But they won’t, if AARP gets its way.
Counterintuitively, expanding price controls won’t necessarily make medicines more accessible for seniors.
Consider a recent analysis from healthcare consulting firm IQVIA, which examined Medicare Part D insurance claims involving the first 10 medicines subject to price controls. In the first quarter of 2026, Part D insurers rejected 24% of patients’ initial attempts to fill prescriptions for these medicines — the same rejection rate as in 2025, before the price controls took effect.
In other words, the lower prices set by Medicare bureaucrats haven’t made it easier for seniors to actually obtain those medicines. There’s no reason to think that further price controls would cause insurers to relax restrictions on which drugs seniors can take.
ONE VISIT, TWO BILLS: HOW MEDICARE IS QUIETLY FLEECING AMERICA’S SENIORS
Seniors — and all Americans — deserve access to today’s, and tomorrow’s, lifesaving medicines.
But if congressional Democrats and a future President Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Kamala Harris implement AARP’s price control wish list, those drugs will never be invented at all.
Saul Anuzis is president of 60 Plus, the American Association of Senior Citizens.