By
The Biden administration took an unprecedented step of rolling its climate agenda into a health care concern with the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). According to critics, it makes climate change a priority. In both cases, they say, it’s not accomplishing anything with either goal.
Diverted funds
Medicare provisions within the IRA are siphoning funds into green energy policies, Isabelle Morales, federal affairs manager for Americans For Tax Reform, told Just The News. The IRA, Morales explained, grants the Secretary of Health and Human Services the ability to negotiate the price of prescription drugs on behalf of Medicare.
“The negotiation is basically, if a company doesn’t comply, they’re subject to 90% tax on all of their earnings. So, it’s really not a negotiation,” Morales said.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Mark Merritt, president of Proactive Strategies Group, said that only about 15% of the $280 billion in savings from the program goes into Medicare. The bulk of the savings, Merritt explained, are going to support the $7,500 electric-vehicle tax credit.
Morales said the siphoned funds are also supporting the $4,000 used electric-vehicle tax credit, and tax credits for energy efficiency items, such as doors. The tax credits on these vehicles, Merritt said, are items that wealthier Americans purchase. In 2019, half of those enrolled in Medicare earn less than $30,000 per year, whereas the typical Tesla buyer earns around $150,000 per year.
According to Merritt, the savings that go into Medicare pay for some “relatively inexpensive new benefits,” such as a $2,000 annual cap on pharmacy spending. The overall Medicare program’s budget is projected to rise from $1 trillion in 2023 to $1.8 trillion in 2031.
Melting glaciers to asthma
Over the past decade, climate activists have pushed to make climate change a health-care issue. In 2013, journalist Courtney Subramanian argued in Time that climate change should be rebranded a health issue, because people could connect with fears of infectious diseases and childhood asthma more than they could melting glaciers.
The rhetoric on climate change since then has spilled over into health issues, even into medical journals. In 2021, as people were dying of COVID-19, 200 medical journals published an opinion piece by a group of medical journal editors that called climate change the “greatest threat to public health.” That same year, Harvard and U.K. universities produced a study claiming that fossil fuels were responsible for 1 in 5 deaths – 8 million people annually.
Energy expert and author Alex Epstein criticized the study for ignoring the strong correlations between fossil fuels use and markers of human improvement, such as increased standard of living, access to clean water, life expectancy, and infant mortality. Since 1980, Epstein wrote on “Energy Talking Points,” India’s fossil fuel use grew 700% and China’s fossil fuel use increased 600%, citing BP Statistical Review of World Energy. Between 1980 and 2020, according to World Bank data, life expectancy in India increased by 16 years, and life expectancy in China increased by 10 years, Epstein wrote.
With the popular merging of concerns about climate change and health issues, the IRA was promoted as a sweeping climate and health care bill. Jeff Reynolds, senior investigative researcher with Restoration of America, told Just The News that the IRA does nothing for health care. “It reminds me a lot of Obamacare. It wasn’t anything they claimed it was going to be,” he said.
Instead of truly lowering drug prices, which are skyrocketing, Reynolds said, the IRA diverts funding into electric vehicles and that the combination of climate change and health issues follows a similar pattern to what was seen during the COVID pandemic, where fears of deadly infections were used by politicians to justify restrictions that were unnecessary and ultimately harmful.
“That’s exactly what they’re doing with climate change,” he said.
Minimal impact
The IRA will grant the Secretary of Health and Human Services in 2026 authority for price controls on 10 separate drugs, and over time, that increases to 20. Morales said that these price controls will ultimately disincentivize drug innovations, as it can take 15 years and billions of dollars to develop a drug and bring it to market.
