By: Nick Bonds, Esq.

With Presidential impeachment eating up the above-the-fold coverage pretty much universally, it is important to remember that Congress has other pressing issues to attend to. While a number of Democratic candidates are worried their mandatory attendance at the Senate trial will eat up valuable campaign time on the ground in the early primary states, the rest of Congress is still trying to keep the country running.

For instance, while Democrats and Republicans have an “agreement in principle” on a stopgap appropriations deal to fund the government through the end of the fiscal year, the spending package still needs to be finalized an passed before December 20 to avoid another looming shutdown. Meanwhile, the House Ways and Means Committee is working to ratify the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), the Trump Administration’s replacement for NAFTA. Both of these urgent matters of business appear to have bipartisan support, but Congress is certainly feeling the pressure as this week gets underway.

The major sticking point in the USMCA negotiations appears to be the debate around the trade deal’s prescription drug provisions. The pharmaceutical lobby has long been pushing for prescription drug protections in trade deals – remember the TPP – but this time around the White House’s primary objective appears to be lowering drug prices. A concession to strike protections for biologics from the trade agreement appears to have clinched Democratic support, who opposed the deal’s 10 years of regulatory data protection for biologics innovations. Democrats argued that the biologics protections would increase drug prices in the U.S. and delay development of cheaper biosimilar drugs.

While the USMCA appears on track for ratification, Speaker Pelosi’s prize fight of the moment is her drug pricing bill – which passed the House along party lines last Thursday. The bill, named for late Representative Elijah Cummings, aims to expand Medicare, reign in drug prices, and allow the HHS Secretary to negotiate prices of between 50 and 250 prescription drugs (including insulin). President Trump appears poised to veto the Elijah Cummings Lower Drug Costs Now Act, while the Senate is debating a more moderate proposal – the Prescription Drug Pricing Reduction Act (PDPRA). The PDPRA would add consumer protections to cap out-of-pocket (OOP) prescription drug spending, and take measures to redesign Medicare Part D and reign in drug prices.

Congress has a lot of irons in the fire this week. We shall see what they can hammer out.