The Affordable Medicine Act was passed by the General Assembly earlier this year, with sweeping bipartisan approval in both the House of Delegates and the state Senate. As originally written, the bill would mandate that as a maximum fair price on a drug is set for Medicare recipients, that same price would also be adopted for Virginians on any state-regulated healthcare plan.
Rhena Hicks, Co-Executive Director of Freedom Virginia, says the bill would allow hundreds-of-thousands more Virginians to benefit from the federal Medicare Drug Price Negotiation Program, “That means that lower drug cost for roughly 350,000 Virginians on the State Marketplace, 160,000 state employees, and others in the state-regulated health plans. So, Virginia would just leverage the work that the federal government has already done.”
The bill was sent back to the General Assembly with amendments earlier this week by Governor Spanberger. Among those amendments, is a reenactment clause that Hicks calls a “soft-veto.” “What it does, is it sends the legislation back to the General Assembly the following session. So this would push it to the 2027 session. It would have to be re-approved by the General Assembly, and could still lead to, kind of, the same outcome we have here,” she says.
But Hicks says there’s still hope for the bill yet. Since it was passed nearly unanimously, with a 36-4 vote in the state Senate and a 95-4 vote in the House of Delegates, the General Assembly theoretically has the numbers it needs to reject the Governor’s amendments.
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