Vance Must Put America First on Healthcare

Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance has made quite a splash since arriving in Washington less than two years ago. He's gone from the junior senator from Ohio and the 96th by seniority to the top of the Republican ticket as Donald Trump's running mate.

Vance has branded himself as an "America First" conservative. That cry was even the title of his walk-out song at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee this month.

Some of the views he's articulated on health care, however, deviate from that "America First" ethos.

Take his support for importing prescription drugs from Canada.

Our neighbor to the north's Patented Medicine Prices Review Board maintains price controls on brand-name medicines. As a result, prices for branded drugs in Canada tend to be lower than in the United States.

Supporters of drug importation see it as a way to bring those lower Canadian prices stateside.

Democrats have gone a step further by authorizing Medicare to levy price controls on a steadily increasing number of drugs, starting with 10 under Medicare Part D in 2026. Vance has expressed sympathy for this move, too.

Levying Canadian-style price controls on prescription drugs is not putting America first. In fact, it would harm American patients by depriving our country's drug development ecosystem of the revenue needed to create the next generation of effective therapies.

It takes about $2.6 billion and 15 years to bring a drug through the development and approval process to patients. Roughly nine in 10 drug candidates that enter clinical development fail to make it to market.

Americans may pay more for brand-name drugs than Canadians. But as a result, we have access to more innovative medicines than Canadians do.

Eighty-five percent of the 460 drugs launched worldwide between 2012 and 2021 were available in the United States as of October 2022. Just 45% of those drugs were available in Canada.

Importing Canada's price controls could result in American patients having access to far fewer innovative drugs. A better solution is to use trade agreements to compel foreign countries to pay their fair share of the cost of developing these drugs — the majority of which originate right here in the United States.

We shouldn't allow Canada to free-ride off U.S. investment in pharmaceutical research and development.

This idea should be right up Vance's alley. He has been a vocal supporter of trade policies that aim to bolster domestic industries. As he argued this past spring, "I certainly think we should be much more aggressive in applying tariffs on a whole host of industries."

Set aside the relative wisdom — or lack thereof — of tariffs. Why shouldn't Vance's support for domestic industry extend to a strategically important sector where the United States is the global leader — pharmaceuticals?

After all, the life sciences industry supports nearly 5 million jobs across the economy, many of them in manufacturing.

Seen in this light, drug importation functions as a kind of reverse tariff — one that undermines one of our most thriving industries and benefits foreign entities at the expense of our own.

Vance's support for propping up Obamacare also flies in the face of his broader philosophy. It's hard to see how capping health insurance premiums for those who make more than four times the federal poverty level — $124,800 for a family of four — at 8.5% of income and having taxpayers pick up the rest is populist or conservative.

Donald Trump has called Obamacare "a catastrophe." In 2017, Vance condemned Republican efforts to repeal and replace the law as "incoherence masquerading as ideological purity."

"We’ll rail against the way the government has destroyed our health care market in one breath and resist the support offered to the poor and middle class to navigate this brokenness with the other," he wrote for the New York Times.

We already have a party committed to preserving and building upon Obamacare — the Democrats. Republicans ought to explain how they'll clean up Obamacare's mess and create a more competitive, transparent, accessible and affordable healthcare market.

One place they can start is by undoing the Biden administration's recent decision to offer illegal immigrants who came to the country as children subsidized coverage through the exchanges — in violation of the Affordable Care Act itself. Vance has introduced legislation to that effect and decried the Biden administration's new policy.

America First could prove a compelling pitch to voters. On health care, it's crucial that Vance's policy matches his rhetoric.